Experience with ROBOT in 12 Commercial, Natural Language Data Base Query Applications

Abstract

£ne aoility to unaerstand ~atural Language has long been a goal of Artificial Intelligence rteaearch, and it is still far from being solved. rlowever, in toe early l~lv's the AI research techniques reached a point whereby certain a~plications became feasible for toe first time. Since that time, several ststems sucn as PLANES[!], LIFER[2], and ROBOT[3,4,S] have been built tnat nave oemonatrated tnat the current state of the art is sufficient for quite ~ooa natural lan~uage aata uase ~uery. ~ne i~plementation of the R030l' system has been ~eared for high performance and installaoility in actual real world environments. As sucn, it offers the AI researco com~unity aome inai~ht into toe aifficulties encountered when putting t~e c~rrenc AI tecnnolo~y in tne nands of people in the real world. This paper u1sc~sses cne unex~ecteo lin~uistic and semantic difficulties encountered in the 1~ co.n .•lercial applications to wnicn t<Jao ·r has been applied during the last year