--- title: "Experience with ROBOT in 12 Commercial, Natural Language Data Base Query Applications" authors: - "Larry R. Harris" doi: "" url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/79" pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/0079.pdf" venue: "Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence" year: 1979 pages: "" track: "" keywords: --- # Experience with ROBOT in 12 Commercial, Natural Language Data Base Query Applications Larry R. Harris *Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*. ## 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