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From: yvonne@gufalet.let.rug.nl (Yvonne Vogelenzang)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Recent Natural Language Interfaces
Keywords: NLP, interfaces, literature
Message-ID: <1177@gufalet.let.rug.nl>
Date: 26 Jul 90 10:52:47 GMT
References: <1160@gufalet.let.rug.nl>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Faculty of Arts, Groningen, The Netherlands
Lines: 49

In article <1160@gufalet.let.rug.nl> I wrote:
>I'm writing a paper about natural language interfaces and I wonder if anyone 
>can tell me more about such interfaces. 

I received some requests from people to summarize the reactions I received,
so here it comes:

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>From: Fabrizio Sebastiani <fabrizio@cs.toronto.edu>

One project I know of (I worked there myself) is the CFID project, AKA ESPRIT
P527 "Communication Failure In Dialogue". A number of papers have appeared on 
this project; one of them is in this year's AIMSA conference (the authors are 
Ferrari,Prodanof, Reilly and Saffiotti), another was in COLING'86 (Ferrari, 
Reilly). Saffiotti and I wrote a paper (it appears on the Proc. of the 1988 
IEEE Conf. on AI Applications) on a knowledge representation language we 
designed that was tailored to the needs of such an interface. 

>From: groen@cs.sfu.ca (Chris Groeneboer)

McFetridge, P., G. Hall, N. Cercone, and W.S. Luk, "System X: A Portable 
Natural Lanugage Interface", in: "Proceedings of 7th Biennial Conference of 
Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence", Edmonton, 
Alberta, 1988, pp. 30-38
  
>From: andrew@dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick DGBT/DBR)

Whalen, T.E., & Patrick, A.S. (1990).  COMODA: A conversation model
for database access.  BEHAVIOUR & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, 9, 93-110.

>From: alex@dutirt2.tudelft.nl (Alexander Vonk)

Gazdar, G. & Mellish, C. (1989). "Natural Language Processing in Prolog",
Addison-Wesley.
Allen, J. (1987). "Natural Language Understanding", Benjamin Cummings.

>From: ak@cs.uni-sb.de (Alfred Kobsa)

I received a long article from the university of Saarbru"cken, Dept. of
computer science, D-6600 Saarbru"cken 11, West-Germany, about XTRA, their 
Natural Language Access System for Expert Systems. This article contained a 
lot of references, far too much to put on the net.
Here's one:
Allgayer, J., K. Harbusch, A Kobsa, C. Reddig, N. Reithinger & D. Schmauks
(1989). "XTRA: A Natural-language access system to expert systems", in:
Internat. Journal on Man-Machine Studies 31, 161-195 
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I hope I have helped some of you with this summary.
Yvonne