Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!fornax!fass
From: fass@fornax.UUCP (Dan Fass)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Menu-Based Natural Language Understanding
Summary: Request for Information
Message-ID: <1367@fornax.UUCP>
Date: 11 Oct 90 00:44:00 GMT
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 64


I am looking for post-1987 information about the menu-based approach 
to natural language understanding (NLU) developed by Harry Tennant 
(Tennant, 1987; Tennant et al, 1983).
Does anyone have the references for recent papers about the approach?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the approach?
Has anyone had experience with the NLMenu System developed by Texas
Instruments?
Does anyone have Harry's e-mail address?
Please send mail to me and I will post a summary of responses to the net
(if there are any).

	
     ** -- Brief Description of the Menu-Based Approach to NLU -- **

The menu-based approach to NLU combines the expressive power of natural 
language with the ease of use of menus. 
In the pure version of the approach, sentences are built through menu 
selection:

      ``The user is presented with a set of menus on the upper half 
	of a high resolution bit map display. He can choose the words 
	and phrases that make up his query with a mouse. As the user 
	chooses items, they are inserted into a window on the lower 
	half of the screen so that he can see the sentence he is 
	constructing. As a sentence is constructed, the active menus 
	and items in them change to reflect only the legal choices, 
	given the portion of the sentence that has already been input. 
	At any point in the construction of a natural language sentence, 
	only those words or phrases that could legally come next will be 
	displayed for the user to select'' (Tennant et al, 1983, p. 152).

The approach offers some attractive features as a natural language 
interface (NLI): 
o  easy to use; 
o  cuts down on spelling and typographical errors; 
o  minimizes typewriter key/mouse operations,
o  helps overcome user difficulties in starting a query;
o  keeps users within the linguistic and conceptual coverage of the NLI; 
o  reveals to users the full coverage of the NLI through the menus.

Tennant et al (1983, p. 157) mention that the NLMenu System is implemented 
in Lisp and that a second implementation will be available as a software 
package that ``will interface either locally to RSI's Oracle relational 
DBMS which uses SQL 3.0 as the query language or to remote computers 
running DBMS's that use SQL 3.0 as their query language.'' 

		
		    ** -- References -- **

Tennant, H. R., K. M. Ross, R. M. Saenz, C. W. Thompson, & J. R. Miller.
Menu-Based Natural Language Understanding.
In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for 
Computational Linguistics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, pp. 151-158, 1983.

Tennant, H. R.
Menu-Based Natural Language.
In: S. C. Shapiro (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence.
New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 594-597, 1987.


______________
Dan Fass
fass@cs.sfu.ca