An eclectic approach to Building natural language interfaces

Abstract

INKA is a natural language interface to facilitate knowledge acquisition during expert system development for electronic instrument trouble-shooting. The expert system design methodology develops a domain definition, called GLIB, in the form of a semantic grammar. This grammar format enables GLIB to be used with the INGLISH interface, which constrains users to create statements within a subset of English. Incremental patting in INGLISH allows immediate remedial information to be generated if a user deviates from the sublanguage. Sentences are translated into production rules using the methodology of lexical-functional grammar. The system is written in Small talk and, in INK,A, produces rides for a Prolog inference engine.