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 psychological 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 ...

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 Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

. An intuitive general natural-language interface is one of the active goals of the Semantic Web. 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. 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 Keyword may refer to: Computing * Keyword (Internet search), a word or phrase typically used by bloggers or online content creator to rank a web page on a particular topic * Index term, a term used as a keyword to documents in an information syste ...

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

Prolog Prolog is a 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 intended primarily a ...

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 created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines ...

, 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 ''Languageaccess'' * Q&A from

Symantec Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier ...

. * ''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, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence 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 In linguistics, anaphora () is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent or postcedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an a ...

: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 users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to ind ...

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 ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

. * ''

Software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

'': An

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

can embed natural-language interfaces to help developers. 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 current a ...

, 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 designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.

Siri

Siri is an

intelligent personal assistant An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...

application integrated with operating system iOS. The application uses

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

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 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 fil ...

– 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 (pronounced as pick-em-all) is a website, designed as a decision engine that uses consumer input to provide specialized search results for products and categories. Unlike typical search engines, Pikimal mines data to provide users with o ...

– 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 p ...

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

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

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

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

. * 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. Based in San Jose, California, Yebol's artificial intelligence human intelligence-infused algorithms automatically cluster and categori ...

– 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 Applications of artificial intelligence Natural language processing Computational linguistics Information retrieval techniques