Abstracts of Current Literature

ABSTRACTS OF CURRENT LITERATURE Single copies can be ordered from: D. Borchers University of Saarbruecken FB 10 Informatik IV Im Stadtwald 15 D-6600 Saarbruecken 11 Fed. Rep. of Germany Telephone: 0681/302-2363 NEW REPORTS AND MEMOS Report No. 5 Entworf eines aktiven, wissensbasierten Hilfesystems fuer SINIX. Kemke, C. Abridged version in LDV-Forum. No. 2, December 1985, pp. 43-60. Report No. 6 The Role of Natural Language in Advanced Knowledge-Based Systems Wahlster, W. In Winter, H. (Hrsg.): Artificial Intelligence and Man-Machine Systems. Heidelberg: Springer 1986, pp. 62-83. The SC (SINIX Consultant) system is a natural language help facility for the SINIX operating system. SC should answer natural language questions about concepts and commands of the SINIX system. Furthermore, it should, as an active help system, give unsolicited advice to a user during his work with SINIX. In this paper, a short introduction to intelligent help systems is given, followed by an overview of the help systems UC, UCC, and WIZARD, the domain of which are the operating systems UNIX and VMS, respectively. In the next sections the basic structure and function of the SC is explained with special regard to the aspects of planning/problem-solving and knowledge representation. Natural language processing is a prerequisite for advanced knowledge-based systems since the ability to acquire, retrieve, exploit, and present knowledge critically depetads on natural language comprehension and production. Natural language concepts guide the interpretation of what we see, hear, read or experience with other senses. In the first part of the paper, we illustrate the needed capabilities of cooperative dialog systems with a detailed example: the interaction between a customer and a clerk at an information desk in a train station. It is shown that natural language systems cannot just rely on knowledge about syntactical and semantical aspects of language but also have to exploit conceptual and inferential knowledge, and a user model. In the remainder, we analyze and evaluate three natural language systems which were introduced to the commercial market in 1985: Language Craft TM by Carnegie Group Inc.; NLMenu by Texas Instruments Inc.; and Q & A TM by Symantec Inc. The detailed examination of these systems shows their capabilities and limitations. We conclude that the technology for limited natural-language access systems is available now, but in foreseeable future the capabilities of such systems in no way match human performance in face-to-face communication. 66 Computational Linguistics, Volume 14, Number 1, Winter 1988 Abstracts of Current Literature Report No. 7 Combining Deictic Gestures and Natural Language for Referent Identification Kobsa, A.; Allgayer, Y.; Reddig-Siekmann, C.; Reithinger, N.; Schmauks, D.; Harbusch, K.; Wahlster, W. In COLING '86. llth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Proceedings. Bonn 1986, pp. 356-361. Report No. 8 Eine Graphikkomponente zur Integration von Zeigehandlungen in natuerlichsprachliche KI-Systeme. AUgayer, J. In GI-16. Jahrestagung. Proceedings, Vol. 1. Berlin 1986, pp. 284-298. Report No. 9 Coping with the Intrinsic and Deictic Uses of Spatial Prepositions Andre, E.; Herzog, G. and Rist, 1". In Jorrand, Ph. and Sgurev, V., (eds.): Artificial Intelligence II. Proceedings of AIMSA-86. …

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