Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is 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 Understanding is a cognitive process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of u ...

wide varieties of ambiguous input. Natural-language interfaces are an active area of study in the field of natural-language processing and

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

. An intuitive general natural-language interface is one of the active goals of the

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

. Text interfaces are "natural" to varying degrees. 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. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

state has the highest

income tax An income tax is a tax imposed on individuals or entities (taxpayers) in respect of the income or profits earned by them (commonly called taxable income). Income tax generally is computed as the product of a tax rate times the taxable income. Tax ...

?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead 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, due to the question being included.

History

Prototype Nl interfaces had already appeared in the late sixties and early seventies.Natural Language Interfaces to Databases – An Introduction, I. Androutsopoulos, G.D. Ritchie, P. Thanisch, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh *

SHRDLU SHRDLU is an early natural-language understanding computer program that was developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and query ...

, a natural-language interface that manipulates blocks in a virtual "blocks world" *''Lunar'', a natural-language interface to a database containing chemical analyses of

Apollo 11 Apollo 11 was a spaceflight conducted from July 16 to 24, 1969, by the United States and launched by NASA. It marked the first time that humans Moon landing, landed on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin l ...

Moon rocks Moon rock or lunar rock is rock originating from Earth's Moon. This includes lunar material collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon, and rock that has been ejected naturally from the Moon's surface and landed on Earth a ...

b
William A. Woods
*''Chat-80'' transformed English questions into

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving, and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic. Unlike many other programming language ...

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. An online demo is available on the LPA website. *

ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and ...

, written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966, mimicked a psychotherapist and was operated by processing users' responses to scripts. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, the DOCTOR script sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction. An online demo is available on the LPA website. * ''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 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

''Languageaccess'' * Q&A from Symantec. * ''Datatalker'' from Natural Language Inc. * ''Loqui'' from BIM Systems. * ''English Wizard'' from Linguistic Technology Corporation.

Challenges

Natural-language interfaces have in the past led users to anthropomorphize the computer, or at least to attribute more intelligence to machines than is warranted. On the part of the user, this has led to unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of the system. Such expectations will make it difficult to learn the restrictions of the system if users attribute too much capability to it, and will ultimately lead to disappointment when the system fails to perform as expected as was the case in the

AI winter In the history of artificial intelligence (AI), an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research.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 that companies can't have driving 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. Other goals to consider more generally are the speed and efficiency of the interface, in all algorithms these two points are the main point that will determine if some methods are better than others and therefore have greater success in the market. In addition, localisation across multiple language sites requires extra consideration - this is based on differing sentence structure and language syntax variations between most languages. Finally, regarding the methods used, the main problem to be solved is creating a general algorithm that can recognize the entire spectrum of different voices, while disregarding nationality, gender or age. The significant differences between the extracted features - even from speakers who says the same word or phrase - must be successfully overcome.

Uses and applications

The natural-language interface gives rise to technology used for many different applications. Some of the main uses are: * ''Dictation'', is the most common use for automated speech recognition (ASR) systems today. This includes medical transcriptions, legal and business dictation, and general word processing. In some cases special vocabularies are used to increase the accuracy of the system. * ''Command and control'', ASR systems that are designed to perform functions and actions on the system are defined as command and control systems. Utterances like "Open Netscape" and "Start a new xterm" will do just that. * ''Telephony'', some PBX/

Voice Mail A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows callers to leave a Voice recording, recorded message when the recipient has been unable (or unwilling) to answer the Telephone, phone. Calls may ...

systems allow callers to speak commands instead of pressing buttons to send specific tones. * ''Wearables'', because inputs are limited for wearable devices, speaking is a natural possibility. * ''Medical, disabilities'', many people have difficulty typing due to physical limitations such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI), muscular dystrophy, and many others. For example, people with difficulty hearing could use a system connected to their telephone to convert a caller's speech to text. * ''Embedded applications'', some new cellular phones include C&C speech recognition that allow utterances such as "call home". This may be a major factor in the future of automatic speech recognition and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. Below are named and defined some of the applications that use natural-language recognition, and so have integrated utilities listed above.

Ubiquity

Ubiquity, an add-on for

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

, 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.

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 engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

would. It was announced in March 2009 by

Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram ( ; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical So ...

, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.

Siri

Siri is an

intelligent personal assistant A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to strea ...

application integrated with operating system

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

. The application uses

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

to answer questions and make recommendations. Siri's marketing claims include that it adapts to a user's individual preferences over time and personalizes results, and performs tasks such as making dinner reservations while trying to catch a cab.

Others

* Ask.com – The original idea behind Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) was traditional keyword searching with an ability to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions. * Braina – Braina is a natural language interface for

Windows OS Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

that allows to type or speak English language sentences to perform a certain action or find information. GNOME Do Classic

GNOME Do GNOME Do (often referred to as Do) is a free and open-source application launcher for Linux originally created by David Siegel, and currently maintained by Alex Launi. Like other application launchers, it allows searching for applications and fi ...

– 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.). * hakia – hakia was an Internet search engine. The company invented an alternative new infrastructure to indexing that used SemanticRank algorithm, a solution mix from the disciplines of ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational linguistics, and mathematics. hakia closed in 2014. * Lexxe – Lexxe was an Internet search engine that used natural-language processing for queries (semantic search). Searches could be made with keywords, phrases, and questions, such as "How old is Wikipedia?" Lexxe closed its search engine services in 2015. * Pikimal – Pikimal used natural-language tied to user preference to make search recommendations by template. Pikimal closed in 2015. *

Powerset In mathematics, the power set (or powerset) of a set is the set of all subsets of , including the empty set and itself. In axiomatic set theory (as developed, for example, in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is po ...

– On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

using conversational phrases rather than keywords. On July 1, 2008, it was purchased by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. * Q-go – 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 Technologies in 2011. * Yebol – Yebol was a vertical "decision" search engine that had developed a knowledge-based, semantic search platform. Yebol's artificial intelligence human intelligence-infused algorithms automatically clustered and categorized search results, web sites, pages and content that it presented in a visually indexed format that is more aligned with initial human intent. Yebol used association, ranking and clustering algorithms to analyze related keywords or web pages. Yebol integrated 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 was retained and regenerated forward.Humphries, Matthew
"Yebol.com steps into the search market"
''Geek.com''. 31 July 2009.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Natural language user interface User interfaces Natural language processing Computational linguistics Information retrieval techniques