Rapid Porting of the Parlance™ Natural Language Interface

RAPID PORTING OF THE PARLANCE tm NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE Madeleine Bates BBN Systems and Technologies Corp. 10 Moulton Street Cambridge, Mass. 02138 ABSTRACT Developing knowledge bases for AI systems takes too long and costs too much. Even a "portable" system may be expensive to use because its installation takes a long time or requires the labor of scarce, highly-trained people. BBN has recently created a tool for acquisition which dramatically reduces the time and cost of installing a natural language system. During 1988, BBN used its Learner tm tool to configure the Parlance tm database interface to two different versions of a large Navy database. The configuration process was performed primarily with development versions of the Learner, which is a software tool for creating the knowledge bases, vocabulary, and mappings to the database that enable the Parlance interface to understand questions addressed to a particular database. The Learner reduced the time required to create Parlance configurations from months to weeks, and demonstrated that the Learner works effectively on databases with many hundreds of fields. INTRODUCTION THE NAVY'S IDB DATABASE The IDB (hereafter called the Navy database) is a large, evolving database being used in the Fleet Command Center at the Navy's Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii [Ceruti, 1988]. It has dozens of tables and hundreds of fields containing information about hundreds of U.S. ships, planes and other units, as well as more limited data on foreign units. Examples of the kind of information that may be available for a particular unit are: its home port, current location, current employments (an employment is a complex concept including destination, projected arrival time, purpose, etc.), type and amount of equipment on board, various types of readiness status (personnel readiness, equipment readiness, overall readiness, etc.), and operating characteristics (average cruising speed, maximum speed, fuel capacity, etc.). Other data in this database include detailed information about the characteristics of various types of equipment (e.g., the firing rate of guns) and properties of geographic entities (e.g., for ports, the country they are in, and whether they have a deep channel). The Navy database provides basic data for systems under development at the Fleet Command Center. This database offers a rich environment for a natural language interface, because the need to explore the database with ad hoc queries occurs frequently. 83 THE PARLANCE INTERFACE The Parlance interface from BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation is an English language database front end. It has a number of component parts: a graphical user interface, a language understander that translates English queries into database commands for relational database systems such as Oracle and VAX Rdb, a control structure for interacting with the user to clarify ambiguous queries or unknown words, and a dbms driver to call the database system to execute database commands and to return retrieved data to the user. The Parlance system uses several domain-dependent knowledge bases: 1. A domain model, which is a class-and-attribute representation of the concepts and relationships that the Parlance user might employ …

Content truncated to 500 words