This paper is a discussion of the technical issues and solutions encountered in making the ASK System transportable. A natural language system can be “transportable” in a number of ways. Although transportability to a new domain is most prominent, other ways are also important if the system is to have viability in the commercial marketplace.
On the one hand, transporting a system to a new domain may start with the system prior to adding any domain of knowledge and extend it to incorporate the new domain. On the other hand, one may wish to add to a system that already has knowledge of one domain the knowledge concerning a second domain, that is, to extend the system to cover this second domain. In the context of ASK, it has been natural to implement extending and then achieve transportability as a special case.
In this paper, we consider six ways in which the ASK System can be extended to include new capabilities:
to a new domain,
to a new object type,
to access data from a foreign database,
to a new natural language,
to a new programming language,
to a new computer family.
Special-purpose applications, such as those to accommodate standard office tasks, would make use of these various means of extension.
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