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<Paper uid="H89-1008">
  <Title>RAPID PORTING OF THE PARLANCE tm NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="83" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
THE NAVY'S IDB DATABASE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The IDB (hereafter called the Navy database) is a large, evolving database being used in the Fleet Command Center at the Navy's Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii \[Ceruti, 1988\]. It has dozens of tables and hundreds of fields containing information about hundreds of U.S. ships, planes and other units, as well as more limited data on foreign units.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Examples of the kind of information that may be available for a particular unit are: its home port, current location, current employments (an employment is a complex concept including destination, projected arrival time, purpose, etc.), type and amount of equipment on board, various types of readiness status (personnel readiness, equipment readiness, overall readiness, etc.), and operating characteristics (average cruising speed, maximum speed, fuel capacity, etc.). Other data in this database include detailed information about the characteristics of various types of equipment (e.g., the firing rate of guns) and properties of geographic entities (e.g., for ports, the country they are in, and whether they have a deep channel).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Navy database provides basic data for systems under development at the Fleet Command Center. This database offers a rich environment for a natural language interface, because the need to explore the database with ad hoc queries occurs frequently.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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