Natural language user interface
Encyclopedia
Natural Language User Interfaces (LUI) are a type of computer human interface
where linguistic phenomena 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.
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.
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.
, is a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups
of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages.
would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram
, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.
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.
A 1995 paper titled 'Natural Language Interfaces to Databases – An Introduction', describes some challenges:
The request “List all employees in the company with a driving licence” is ambiguous unless you know companies can't have drivers licences.
“List all applicants who live in California and Arizona.” is ambiguous unless you know that a person can't live in two places at once.
- resolve what a user means by 'he', 'she' or 'it', in a self-referential query.
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications.
In interface design
Interface design
Interface design deals with the process of developing a method for two modules in a system to connect and communicate. These modules can apply to hardware, software or the interface between a user and a machine...
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.
Natural language interfaces are an active area of study in the field of natural language processing
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
and Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
.
An intuitive general Natural language interface is one of the active goals of the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
.
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.United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
state has the highest income tax
Income tax
An income tax is a tax levied on the income of individuals or businesses . Various income tax systems exist, with varying degrees of tax incidence. Income taxation can be progressive, proportional, or regressive. When the tax is levied on the income of companies, it is often called a corporate...
?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords
Keyword (Internet search)
An index term, subject term, subject heading, or descriptor, in information retrieval, is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the...
'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.
History
Prototype Nl interfaces had already appeared in the late sixties and early seventies.- Lunar, a natural language interface to a database containing chemical analyses of Apollo-11 moon rocks by William A. Woods.
- Chat-80 transformed English questions into PrologPrologProlog is a general purpose logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: the program logic is expressed in terms of...
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.
- IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
Languageaccess - Q&A from SymantecSymantecSymantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
. - Datatalker from Natural Language Inc.
- Loqui from BimBimBim is a 1974 Trinidad and Tobago film written by Raoul Pantin and directed by Hugh A. Robertson. It was described by Bruce Paddington as "one of the most important films to be produced in Trinidad and Tobago".-Plot:...
. - English Wizard from Linguistic Technology Corporation.
Ubiquity
Ubiquity, an add-on for Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
, is a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups
Mashup (web application hybrid)
In Web development, a mashup is a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services...
of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engineSearch engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.- Biography :...
, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.
Siri
Siri is a personal assistantPersonal assistant
A personal assistant or personal aide is someone who assists in daily business or personal tasks. It is common in design to have a PDA, or personal design assistant....
application for the iPhone OS
IPhone OS
iOS is Apple's mobile operating system. Originally developed for the iPhone, it has since been extended to support other Apple, Inc. devices such as the iPod Touch, iPad, and Apple TV. Apple, Inc. does not license iOS for installation on third-party hardware...
. The application uses natural language processing
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
to answer questions and make recommendations. The iPhone app is the first public product by its makers, who are focused on artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
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.
Others
- Anboto Group - Anboto provides Web Customer Service and e-Commerce technology based on Semantics and Natural Language Processing. The main offer of Anboto are the Virtual Sales Agent and Intelligent Chat.
- Q-goQ-goQ-go is a privately owned international company that specializes in semantic search SaaS, based on Natural Language Processing technology. The technology provides relevant answers to users in response to queries on a company’s internet website or corporate intranet, formulated in natural sentences...
- The Q-go technology provides relevant answers to users in response to queries on a company’s internet website or corporate intranet, formulated in natural sentences or keyword input alike. Q-go was acquired by RightNow TechnologiesRightNow TechnologiesRightNow Technologies is a U.S. software company that develops customer relationship management software for enterprise organizations. It is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Bozeman, Montana....
in 2011 - Ask.comAsk.comAsk is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...
- The original idea behind Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions. - C-Phrase - C-Phrase is a web-based natural language front end to relational databases. C-Phrase runs under LINUX, connects with PostgreSQL databases via ODBC and supports both select queries as well as updates. Currently there is only support for English. C-Phrase is hosted on Google Code site.
- GNOME DoGNOME DoGNOME Do is a popular, free application launcher for Linux originally created by David Siegel, and currently maintained by Alex Launi...
- Allows for quick finding miscellaneous artifacts of GNOME environment (applications, Evolution and Pidgin contacts, Firefox bookmarks, Rhythmbox artists and albums, and so on) and execute the basic actions on them (launch, open, email, chat, play, etc.). - BrainboostBrainboostBrainboost is a metasearch engine designed to provide specific answers to questions asked in natural language. Currently it only supports English. The Brainboost engine uses machine learning and natural language processing AI techniques to answer the questions.Traditional engines return the links...
— No longer available - Braina Project - Braina is a natural language user interface software which is currently under developmental stage. It is being developed by a single programmer named Akash Shastri. The main goal of this project is to make computer understand the human language so that a user can control a computer without use of any commands.
- hakiaHakiahakia is an Internet search engine. The company has invented QDEXing technology, an alternative new infrastructure to indexing that uses SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics...
- hakia is an Internet search engine. The company has invented an alternative new infrastructure to indexing that uses SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics. - LexxeLexxeLexxe is an internet search engine that applies Natural Language Processingin its semantic search technology. Founded in 2005 by Dr. Hong Liang Qiao,Lexxe is based in Sydney, Australia....
- Lexxe is an Internet search engine that uses natural language processing for queries (semantic search). Searches can be made with questions, such as "How old is Wikipedia?", as well as keywords and phrases. When it comes to facts, Lexxe is quite effective, though needs much improvement in natural language analysis in the area of facts and in other areas. - PikimalPikimalPikimal is a website, designed as a decision engine that uses consumer input to provide specialized search results for products and categories....
- Pikimal uses natural language tied to user preference to make search recommendations by template. - PowersetPowerset (company)Powerset is a Microsoft owned company based in San Francisco, California that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet....
— On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
using conversational phrases rather than keywords. On July 1, 2008, it was purchased by MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. - START (MIT project) - START, Web-based question answering system. Unlike information retrieval systems such as search engines, START aims to supply users with "just the right information," instead of merely providing a list of hits. Currently, the system can answer millions of English questions about places, movies, people and dictionary definitions.
- Swingly - Swingly is an answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions. Just ask a question in plain English - and Swingly will find you the answer (or answers) you're looking for (according to their site).
- YebolYebolYebol is a vertical "decision" search engine that had developed a knowledge-based, semantic search platform. Based in San Jose, CA, Yebol's artificial intelligence human intelligence-infused algorithms automatically cluster and categorize search results, web sites, pages and contents that it...
- Yebol is a vertical "decision" search engine that had developed a knowledge-based, semantic search platform. Yebol's artificial intelligence human intelligence-infused algorithms automatically cluster and categorize search results, web sites, pages and contents that it presents in a visually indexed format that is more aligned with initial human intent. Yebol uses association, ranking and clustering algorithms to analyze related keywords or web pages. Yebol integrates natural language processing, metasynthetic-engineered open complex systems, and machine algorithms with human knowledge for each query to establish a web directory that actually 'learns,' using correlation, clustering and classification algorithms to automatically generate the knowledge query, which is retained and regenerated forward. - Inbenta - Inbenta's Search Engine is a multilingual, scalable, linguistic, and semantic-based search engine for the enterprise. It is based on the latest developments of the Meaning-Text TheoryMeaning-Text TheoryMeaning–text theory is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language...
and provides intuitive search experiences using natural language. - Mnemoo - Mnemoo is an answer engine that aimed to directly answer questions posed in plain text (Natural Language), which is accomplished using a database of facts and an inference engine.
Challenges
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 too much capability to it, and they will lead to disappointment when the system fails to perform as expected.A 1995 paper titled 'Natural Language Interfaces to Databases – An Introduction', describes some challenges:
- Modifier attachment
The request “List all employees in the company with a driving licence” is ambiguous unless you know companies can't have drivers licences.
- Conjunction and disjunction
“List all applicants who live in California and Arizona.” is ambiguous unless you know that a person can't live in two places at once.
- Anaphora resolution
- resolve what a user means by 'he', 'she' or 'it', in a self-referential query.
See also
- Noisy textNoisy textNoise in text can be defined as any kind of difference between the surface form of a coded representation of the text and the intended, correct, or original text....
- Question answeringQuestion answeringIn information retrieval and natural language processing , question answering is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language...
- Selection-based searchSelection-based searchA selection-based search system is a search engine system in which the user invokes a search query using only the mouse. A selection-based search system allows the user to search the internet for more information about any keyword or phrase contained within a document or webpage in any software...
- Semantic searchSemantic searchSemantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Author Seth Grimes lists "11 approaches that join...
- Semantic WebSemantic WebThe Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...