Publication Details

Team: An Experiment In The Design Of Transportable Natural-Language Interfaces

by Grosz, Barbara and Appelt, Douglas E. and Martin, Paul and Pereira, Fernando

Technical Note 356R
Institution: AI Center, SRI International
Address: 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025
Oct 1986.

Note: Original published September 1986; revised October 1986.

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This paper describes TEAM, a transportable natural-language interface system. TEAM was constructed to test the feasibility of building a natural-language system that could be adapted to interface with new databases by users who were not experts in natural-language processing. The paper presents an overview of the system design, emphasizing those choices that were imposed by the demands of transportability. It discusses several general problems of natural-language processing that were faced in constructing the system, including quantifier scoping, various pragmatic issues, and verb acquisition. The paper also provides a comparison of TEAM with several other transportable systems; the comparison includes discussion of the range of natural language handled by each as well as a description of the approach taken to transportability in each.