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<Paper uid="P84-1014">
  <Title>Interaction of Knowledge Sources in a Portable Natural Language Interface</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> An area of continuing interest and challenge in computational linguistics is the development of techniques for building portable natural language (NL) interfaces (See, for example, \[9,3,12\]). The investigation of this problem has led to several NL systemS, including TEAM \[7\], IRUS \[i\], and INTELLECT \[10\], which separate domain-dependent information from other, more general capabilities, and thus have the ability to be transported from one application to another. However, it is important to realize that the domain-independent portions of such systems constrain both the form and the content of the domain-dependent portions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Thus, in order to understand a system's capabilities, one must have a clear picture of the structure of interaction among these modules.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper describes a general approach to the design of NL interfaces, focusing on the structure of interaction among the components of a portable NL system. The approach has evolved during the development of DATALOG (for &amp;quot;database dialogue&amp;quot;) an esperimental system that accepts a wide variety of English queries and commands and retreives the answer from the user's database. If no items satisfy the user's request, DATALOG gives an informative response explaining what part of the query could not be satisfied. (Generation of responses in DATALOG is described in another report \[6\].) Although DATALOG is primarily a testbed for research, it has been applied to several demonstration databases ~nd one &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; database containing descriptions and rental information for more than 500 computer hardware units.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The portability of DATALOG is based on the independent specification of three kinds of knowledge that such a system must have: a linguistic grammar of English; a general semantic model of database objects and relationships; and a domain model representing the particular concepts of the application domain. After giving a brief overview of the architecture of DATALOG, the remainder of the paper will focus on the interactions among the components of the system, first describing the interaction between syntax and semantics, and then the interaction between general knowledge and domain knowledge.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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