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From: brant%linc.cis.upenn.edu@CIS.UPENN.EDU
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Architectures for interactive systems?
Message-ID: <8607032203.AA12866@linc.cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Thu, 3-Jul-86 18:03:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: linc.8607032203.AA12866
Posted: Thu Jul  3 18:03:11 1986
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There seems to have been a great deal of work done in
natural language processing, yet so far I am unaware of
any attempt to build a practical yet theoretically well-
founded interactive system or an architecture for one.

When I use the phrase "practical yet theoretically well-
founded interactive system," I mean a system that a user
can interact with in natural language, that is capable of
some useful subset of intelligent interactive (question-
answering) behaviors, and that is not merely a clever hack.

Many of the sub-problems have been studied at least once.
Work has been done on various types of necessary response
behavior, such as clarification and misconception correction.
Work has been done on parsing, semantic interpretation, and
text generation, and other problems as well.  But has any
work been done on putting all these ideas together in a
"real" system?  I see a lot of research that concludes with
an implementation that solves only the stated problem, and
nothing else.  Presumably, a "real user" will not want to
have to run system A to correct invalid plans, system B to
answer direct questions, system C to handle questions with
misconceptions, and so forth.

I would be interested to get any references to work on such
integrated systems.  Also, what are people's opinions on this
subject: are practical NLP too hard to build now?  Should we
leave the construction of practical systems to private enter-
prise and restrict ourselves to the basic research problems?
If we do so, how can we be sure we're actually making any
contribution at all?

						Brant

====================
Brant Cheikes
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu
CSNET: brant%upenn-linc@upenn