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MSG: *MSG 1487 Date: 12/17/82 18:47:30 From: LRC.Slocum at UTEXAS-20 Re: Cognitive Systems Date: 17 Dec 1982 1745-CST From: Jonathan Slocum <LRC.Slocum at UTEXAS-20> Subject: Cognitive Systems To: bboard at MIT-AI Two days ago I was in Houston, at the Open House for the new Symbolics, Inc., regional office. Cognitive Systems [Roger Schank's company] was represented by Steven Shwartz and Ann Drinan, and they gave a "live" demo presentation of their new English-to-database interface, supposedly already delivered to a local customer. This system promises understanding of UNRESTRICTED English queries [emphasis mine] COMPARABLE TO A HUMAN'S (within the subject area covered by the database). To quote from their slide, "DISADVANTAGES: None". To open their talk, they went over the failure of Machine Translation in the 50's and early 60's, and how enormous amounts of world knowledge was necessary to correct the glaring deficiencies of those [20-year-old!] approaches. In their demonstration, they were following a fixed, prepared script (if you'll pardon the pun). Then it happened: when they said something about spelling correction, and how wonderfully better their program does it than anyone else's in the world, someone in the audience (a Houston bank officer, or something such) asked them to misspell "scale" as "scle" in the pending command. I sensed a distinct reluctance to try this (a [prepared] example in a subsequent query was promised), but they did it anyway. The resulting input was Use a scle of 1 inch to 2000 feet. The response was There are two states where Bibb county is located: Alabama and Georgia. Pick the state you mean. Wow! But the topper was the following: in the subsequent prepared query, there was a real ambiguity: the query mentioned Bibb County without specifying a state. The system responded with EXACTLY the same request for clarification -- which, in this new context, was precisely the right thing to do. Hmmmm....