Rapid Porting of the Parlancetm Natural Language Interface

Developing knowledge bases for AI systems takes too long and costs too much. Even a "portable" system may be expensive to use because its installation takes a long time or requires the labor of scarce, highly-trained people. BBN has recently created a tool for acquisition which dramatically reduces t h e time and cost of installing a natural language system. During 1988, BBN used its Learner tm tool to configure the Parlance tm database in ter face to two d i f fe rent vers ions of a large Navy database. The configurat ion process was performed primarily with deve lopment versions of the Learner, which is a software tool for creating the knowledge bases, vocabulary, and mappings to the database that enable the Parlance interface to unders tand quest ions addressed to a part icular database. The Learner reduced the time required to create Parlance configurat ions f rom months to weeks, and demonstrated that the Learner works effectively on databases with many hundreds of fields. INTRODUCTION THE NAVY'S IDB DATABASE The IDB (hereafter called the Navy database) is a large, evolving database being used in the Fleet Command Center at the Navy's Pacif ic Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii [Ceruti, 1988]. It has dozens of tables and hundreds of fields containing information about hundreds of U.S. ships, planes and other units, as well as more limited data on foreign units. Examples of the kind of information that may be available for a particular unit are: its home port, current location, current employments (an employment is a complex concept including destination, projected arrival time, purpose, etc.), type and amount of equipment on board, various types of readiness status (personne l readiness , equ ipmen t readiness , overal l readiness , etc.) , and opera t ing charac te r i s t ics (average cruis ing speed, m a x i m u m speed, fuel capacity, etc.). Other data in this database include detailed information about the characteristics of various types of equipment (e.g., the firing rate of guns) and properties of geographic entities (e.g., for ports, the country they are in, and whether they have a deep channel). The Navy database provides basic data for systems under development at the Fleet Command Center. This database offers a rich environment for a natural language interface, because the need to explore the database with ad hoc queries occurs frequent ly.