Abstract

this paper that the natural language interpretation facility is seen by the interface designer as a control or device to be combined with other input controls to produce the most Hall, Popowich and Fass (1996) -- submission to ICTAI '96 3 effective interface for the particular application. This natural language control is a special purpose device rather than a general purpose interface. It processes expressions that are syntactically less complex and semantically more constrained than the full queries processed by traditional NLIs. Therefore, it has more limited requirements for linguistic and domain knowledge, and the associated development, processing, and maintenance costs are reduced. The interpretations produced by such a natural language control are combined with information gleaned from the other controls in the interface to provide the total input requirements of the underlying application. Note, however, that this paper is about the role of natural language as an input control. We will not discuss the role of natural language as a form of output (e.g., the explanation or presentation of results), either on its own or in hybrid form with other media, though the interested reader should see work on combining natural language with graphics (e.g., ((Feiner and McKeown, 1990)) and natural language with hypertext (e.g., (Reiter et al., 1992), (Mittal and Moore, 1995)).

Citations