tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "NATURAL LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER INTEBFACE DESIGN MURRAY TUROFF DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER AND IiVFORMATION SCIENCE IIEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY"

Considering the problems we have in communicating with other h~rmans using natural language, it is not clear that we want to recreate these problems in dealing with the computer. While there is some evidence that natural language is useful in communications among humans, there is also considerable evidence that it is neither perfect nor ideal. Natural language is wordy (redundant) and imprecise. Most b,*m,m groups who have a need to communicate quickly and accurately tend to develop a rather well specified subset of natural language that is highly coded and precise in nature. Pilots and police are good examples. | NATURAL LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER INTERFACE DESIGN MURRAY TUROFF DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SOME ICONOCLASTIC ASSERTIONS Considering the problems ve have in communicating with other humans using natural language it is not clear that we want to recreate these problems in dealfng with the computer. While there is some evidence that natural language is useful in communications among humans there is also considerable evidence that it is neither perfect nor ideal. Natural language is wordy redundant and imprecise. Most human groups who have a need to communicate quickly and accurately tend to develop a rather well specified subset of natural language that is highly coded and precise in nature. Pilots and police are good examples of this. Even working groups within a field or discipline tend over time to develop a jargon that minimizes the effort of communication and clarifies shared precise meanings. It is not clear that there is any group of humans or applications for computers that would be better served in the long run by natural language interfaces. One could provide such an interface for the purpose of acclimating a group or individual to a computer or information system environment but over the long run it would be highly inefficient for a human to continue to use such an interface and would In a real sense be a disservice to the user. Those retrieval systems that allow natural language like queries tend to also allow the user to discover with practice the embedded interface that allows very terse and concise requests to be made of the system. Take the general example of COBOL which was designed as a language to input business oriented programs into a computer that could be understood by non-computer types. We find that if we don t demand that programmers follow certain standards to make this possible they will make their programs cryptic to the point where it is not understandable to anyone but other programmers.