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From: fass@fornax.UUCP (Dan Fass)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Menu-Based Natural Language Understanding
Summary: Summary of Information Received
Message-ID: <1725@fornax.UUCP>
Date: 5 Dec 90 02:13:30 GMT
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 106


Annette Myjak (arm@sps.com) wrote that

>  i used to work in the same lab at texas instruments as harry did.  unless
>  he's relocated from the lab (doubtful, unless he's left ti) or has a really
>  different user id, his netmail address should be:  tennant@csc.ti.com


Graeme Hirst (gh@cs.rochester.edu) told me that

   There is some controversy (and bad feelings) about who actually
   invented the idea.  I think Jim Hendler thinks it was his.
   He's now at U Maryland, hendler@cs.umd.edu.


Jim Hendler (hendler@mimsy.umd.edu), one of the developers of the NLMenu 
system at Texas Instruments, sent a message suggesting

   I contact Brian Phillips, another of the developers, but I have been 
   unable to locate him. He apparently works for Tektronix.


Jim Tyhurst (jimt@context.mentor.com) mentions a paper that discusses some 
of the problems associated with the NLMenu system:

  Tyhurst, James J., and Kerry L. Glover. 1988. A menu-based interface for
  expert system rules. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Expert Systems
  Conference and Exposition (April 12-14, 1988). Detroit: Engineering
  Society of Detroit.  pp. 203-210.


Thomas Grossi (grossi@capsogeti.fr) told me that 

    he has developed a front end quite similar to Tennant's. 
    The front end is part of Esprit-I project "Esteam" and produces 
    Functional Descriptions for a dialogue module (Functional Descriptions 
    are a frame-based linguistic representation used in unification 
    grammars).  

> The system is quite similar to Tennant's, in that at each step the user 
> chooses the next part of the sentence via a menu, except that I have 
> introduced "intermediary" menus that contain non-terminals.  The sequence 
> of menus presented reflects the structure of the underlying functional 
> descriptions, in fact.  A big plus in my system w.r.t Tennant's is that I 
> was able to use the same rules to derive a surface sentence from a 
> functional description; thus I have obtained "menu-based natural language 
> understanding and generation".


Steve Cousins (sbc@informatics.WUstl.EDU) wrote

> I did a master's thesis in 1987 incorporating some of the ideas of NL Menus.
> It was entitled "Grammar-Based Techniques for Interface Design", and was
> done at Washington University in St. Louis.  A very consise (some would say
> cryptic) version of the work appeared in the SIGART Newsletter in October 
> '87. My work describes a Prolog program which does much of what NL Menus 
> does in about 1/2 page of Prolog code (which modifies the DCG mechanism of 
> prolog).

> You should also probably look at CW Thompson's PhD dissertation, which is
> all about NL Menus.  It's got much more detail than the Conference
> proceedings you cited in your note.

> Here are the references: (bibtex form)

@phdthesis{thompson,
        author =        "Craig Warren Thompson",
        title =         "Using Menu-based Natural Language Understanding to 
			 Avoid Problems Associated with Traditional Natural 
			 Language Interfaces to Databases",
        school =        "The University of Texas at Austin",
        year  =         1984
}

@article{cousins,
        author =        "Steve Cousins",
        year =          "October, 1987",
        journal =       "SIGART Newsletter",
        title =         "Automatic Menu Generation"
}

@misc{tennant,
        author =        "Harry R. Tennant and Kenneth M. Ross and Craig W. 
			 Thomson",
        booktitle =     "Proc. CHI '83 Conference on Human Factors in 
			 ComputingSystems",
        year =          "1983",
        pages =         "154-160",
        title =         "Usable Natural Language Interfaces Through Menu-Based
			 Natural Language Understanding"
}

@manual{ti-nlmenus,
        year =          "1985",
        organization =  "Texas Instruments",
        title =         "Explorer Natural Language Menu System User's Guide"
}


Thank you to all those who sent me messages.
I would welcome further information from people about menu-based NLU. 
If I receive more replies, I will summarize to the net again.

_______________
Dan Fass
fass@cs.sfu.ca


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