tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Is There Natural Language after Data Bases?"

The undisputed favorite application for natural language interfaces has been data base query. Why? The reasons range from the relative simplicity of the task, including shallow semantic processing, to the potential real-world utility of the resultant system. Because of such reasons, the data base query task was an excellent paradigmatic problem for computational linguistics, and for the very same reasons it is now time for the field to abandon its protective cocoon and progress beyond this rather limiting task. . | Is There Natural Language after Data Bases Jaime G. Carbonell Computer Science Department Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213 1. Why Not Data Base Query The undisputed favorite application for natural language interfaces has been data base query. Why The reasons range from the relative simplicity of the task including shallow semantic processing to the potential real-world utility of the resultant system. Because of such reasons the data base query task was an excellent paradigmatic problem for computational linguistics and for the very same reasons it is now time for the field to abandon its protective cocoon and progress beyond this rather limiting task. But one may ask what task shall then become the new paradigmatic problem Alas such question presupposes that a single universally acceptable syntactically and semantically challenging task exists. I will argue that better progress can be made by diversification and focusing on different theoretically meaningful problems with some research groups opting to investigate issues arising from the development of integrated multi purpose systems. 2. But I Still Like Data Bases. Well then have I got the natural language interface task for you Data base update presents many unsolved problems not present in pure query systems. Aha the data base adherents1 would say just a minor extension to our work Not at all there is nothing minor about such an extension 4 . Consider for example the following update request to an employee-record data base Smith should work with the marketing team and Jones with sales First the internal ellipsis in the coordinate structure is typical of such requests but is mostly absent from most DB queries. However let us assume that such constructions present no insurmountable problems so that we can address an equally fundamental issue What action should the system take Should Smith be deleted from sales and added to marketing and vice versa for Jones Or should Smith and Jones remain fixed .