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<Paper uid="P84-1043">
  <Title>Natural Language for Expert Systems: Comparisons with Database Systems</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Do natural language database systems still ,~lovide a valuable environment for further work on n~,tural language processing? Are there other systems which provide the same hard environment :for testing, but allow us to explore more interesting natural language questions? In order to answer ,o to the first question and yes to the second (the position taken by our panel's chair}, there must be an interesting language problem which is more naturally studied in some other system than in the database system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We are currently working on natural language for expert systems at Columbia and thus, expert systems provide a natural alternative environment to compare against the database system. The relatively recent success of expert systems in commercial environments (e.g. Stolfo and Vesonder 83, McDermott 81) indicates that they meet the criteria of a hard test environment. In our work, we are particularly interested in developing the ability to generate explanations that are tailored to the user of the system based on the previous discourse. In order to do this in an interesting way, we assume that explanation will be part of natural language dialog with the system, allowing the user maximum flexibility in interacting with the system and allowing the system maximum opportunity to provide different explanations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The influence of the discourse situation on the meaning of an utterance and the choice of response falls into the category of pragmatics, one of the areas of natural language research which has only recently begun to receive much attention. Given this interesting and relatively new area in natural language research, my goals for the paper are to explore whether the expert system or database system better supports study of the effect of previous discourse on current responses and in what ways.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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