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<Paper uid="P85-1038">
  <Title>DICTIONARIES OF THE HIND</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="305" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> I would like to describe some recent psychological research on the nature and organization of lexical knowledge, yet to introduce it that way, as research on the nature and organization of lexical knowledge, usually leaves the impression that it is abstract and not very practical. But that impression is precisely wrong; the work is very practical and not at all abstract. So I shall take a different tack.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Computer scientists -- those in artificial intelligence especlally -- sometimes introduce their work by emphasizing its potential contribution to an understanding of the human mind. I propose to adopt that strategy in reverse: to introduce work in psychology by emphasizing Its potential contribution to the development of information processing and communication systems. We may both be wrong, of course, but at least this strategy indicates a spirit of cooperation. null Let me sketch a general picture of the future. You may not share my expectations, but once you see where I think events are leading, you will understand why I believe that research on the nature and organization of lezical knowledge is worth doing. You may disagree, but at least you will understand.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="305" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Some Technological Assumptions
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> I assume that computers are going to be directly linked by communication networks. Even now, in local area networks, a workstation can access information on any disk connected anywhere in the net.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Soon such networks will not be locally restricted. The model that is emerging is of a very large computer whose parts are geographically distributed; large corporations, government agencies, university consortia, groups of scientists, and others who can afford it will be working together in shared information environments. For example, someday the Association foe Computational Linguistics will maintain and update an exhaustive knowledge base immediately accessible to all computational linguists.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Our present conception of computers as distinct objects will not fade away -the local workstation seems destined to grow smaller and more powerful every year -- but developments in networking will allow users to think of their own workstations not merely as computers, but as windows into a vast information space that they can use however they desire.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Most of the parts needed for such a system already exist, and fiber optic technology will soon transmit broadband signals over long distances at affordable costs. Putting the parts together into large, non-local networks is no trivial task, but it will happen.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> Computer scientists probably have their own versions of this story, but no special expertise is required to see that rapid progress lies ahead. Moreover, this development will have implications for cognitive psychology. However the technological implementation works out, at least one aspect raises questions of considerable psychological interest: in particular, how will people use it? What kind of man-machine interface will there be?  What might lie &amp;quot;beyond the keyboard,&amp;quot; as one futurist has put it (Bolt, 1984), has been a subject for much creative speculation, since the possibilities are numerous and diverse. Although no single interface will be optimal for every use, many users will surely want to interact with the system in something reasonably close to a natural language.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Indeed, if the development of information networks is to be financed by those who use them, the interface will have to be as natural as possible -- which means that natural language processing will be a part of the interface.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6">  Natural language interfaces to large knowledge bases are going to become generally available. The only question is when. How long will it take? Systems already exist that converse and answer questions on restricted topics. How much remains to be done? Before these systems will be generally useful, three difficult requirements will have to be met. An interface must: (1) have access to a large, general-purpose knowledge base; (2) be able to deal with an enormous vocabulary~ (3) be able to reason in ways that human users find familiar. Other features would be highly desirable (e.g., automatic speech recognition, digital processing of images, spatially distributed displays of information), but the three listed above seem critical.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> Requirement (I) will be met by the creation of the network. How a user's special interests will shape the organization of his knowledge base and his locally resident programs poses fascinating problems, but I do not understand them well enough to comment. I simply assume that eventually every user can have at his disposal, either locally or remotely, whatever data bases and expert systems he desires.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="8"> Requirement (3), the ability to draw inferences as people do, is probably the most difficult. It is not likely to be &amp;quot;solved&amp;quot; by any single insight, but a robust system for revising belief structures will be an essential component of any satisfactory interface. I believe that psychologists and other cognitive scientists have much to contribute to the solution of this problem, but the most promising work to date has been done by computer scientists. Since I have little to say about the problem other than how difficult it is, I will turn instead to requirement (2), which seems more tractable. null</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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