---
title: "Transportability and Generality in a Natural-Language Interface System"
authors:
  - "Paul A. Martin"
  - "Douglas E. Appelt"
  - "Fernando C. N. Pereira"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/136"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/0136.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1983
pages: "573-580"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# Transportability and Generality in a Natural-Language Interface System

Paul A. Martin, Douglas E. Appelt, Fernando C. N. Pereira

*Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 573-580.

## Abstract

hi s pap er desc ribes the design of a transportable natural langu age (NL) interface to databases and the co nst raints that transportability places on each compone nt of such a system. By a transportable NL syst em, we m ea n an NL processing system that is con st ructed so that a domain expert (rather than an AI or linguistics expert) can move the system to a new app li cat ion domain. After discussing the general problems presented by transportability, this pap er descr ibes TEAM (an acronym for Transportable English database Access Medium), a demonstratable prototype of suc h a system. The discussion of TEAM shows how domain-independent and domain-dependent information ca n be separated in the differe nt components of a NL inter face system, and presents one method of obtaining domain-speci fi c information from a domain expert.