Natural-language user interface

Natural Language User Interfaces (LUI) are a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomenon such as verbs, phrases, and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting, and modifying data in software applications.

In interface design natural language interfaces are sought after for their speed and ease of use, but most suffer the challenges to understanding wide varieties of ambiguous input.^[1] Natural language interfaces are an active area of study in the field of natural language processing and Computational linguistics. An intuitive general Natural language interface is one of the active goals of the Semantic Web.

It is important to note that text interfaces are 'natural' to varying degrees, and that many formal (un-natural) programming languages incorporate idioms of natural human language. Likewise, a traditional keyword search engine could be described as a 'shallow' Natural language user interface.

Overview

A natural language search engine would in theory find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form 'which U.S. state has the highest income tax?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords 'state, income and tax'. Natural language search, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine.

From a commercial standpoint, advertising on the results page could also be more relevant and could have a higher revenue potential than that of keyword search engines.^{[citation needed]}

History

Prototype Nl interfaces had already appeared in the late sixties and early seventies. ^[2]

Lunar, a natural language interface to a database containing chemical analyses of moon rocks.
Chat-80 transformed English questions into Prolog expressions,

which were evaluated against the Prolog database. The code of Chat-80 was circulated widely, and formed the basis of several other experimental Nl interfaces.

Janus is also one of the few systems to support temporal questions.
Intellect from Trinzic (formed by the merger of AICorp and Aion).
Bbn’s Parlance built on experience from the development of the Rus and Irus systems.

• Ibm’s Languageaccess • Q&A from Symantec. • Datatalker from Natural Language Inc. • Loqui from Bim. • English Wizard from Linguistic Technology Corporation.

Applications

Ubiquity

Wolfram Alpha

Siri

Siri is a personal assistant application for the iPhone OS. The application uses natural language processing to answer questions and make recommendations. The iPhone app is the first public product by its makers, who are focused on artificial intelligence applications.

Siri's marketing claims include that Siri adapts to the user's individual preferences over time and personalizes results, as well as accomplishing tasks such as making dinner reservations while trying to catch a cab. ^[3]

Others

Q-go
Ask.com
Brainboost
hakia
Lexxe
Powerset — On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.^[4] On July 1, 2008, it was purchased by Microsoft.^[5]
START (MIT project) [1]
TrueKnowledge
Yebol

Criticism

Natural language interfaces have in the past led users to anthropomorphize the computer, or at least to attribute more intelligence than is warranted to it. This leads to unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of the system on the part of the user. Such expectations will make it difficult to learn the restrictions of the system if they attribute to much capability to it, and they will lead to disappointment when the system fails to perform as expected.