The converse natural language data management system

This paper presents an overview of research in progress in which the principal aim is the achievement of more natural and expressive modes of on-line communication with complexly structured data bases. A natural-language compiler has been constructed that accepts sentences in a user-extendable English subset, produces surface and deep-structure syntactic analyses, and uses a network of concepts to construct semantic interpretations formalized as computable procedures. The procedures are evaluated by a data management system that updates, modifies, and searches data bases that can be formalized as finite models of states of affairs. The system has been designed and programmed to handle large vocabularies and large collections of facts efficiently. Plans for extending the research vehicle to interface with a deductive inference component and a voice input-output effort are briefly described.