44 lines
1.9 KiB
Groff
44 lines
1.9 KiB
Groff
MSG: *MSG 1487
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Date: 12/17/82 18:47:30
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From: LRC.Slocum at UTEXAS-20
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Re: Cognitive Systems
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Date: 17 Dec 1982 1745-CST
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From: Jonathan Slocum <LRC.Slocum at UTEXAS-20>
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Subject: Cognitive Systems
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To: bboard at MIT-AI
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Two days ago I was in Houston, at the Open House for the new Symbolics,
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Inc., regional office. Cognitive Systems [Roger Schank's company] was
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represented by Steven Shwartz and Ann Drinan, and they gave a "live" demo
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presentation of their new English-to-database interface, supposedly
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already delivered to a local customer. This system promises understanding
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of UNRESTRICTED English queries [emphasis mine] COMPARABLE TO A HUMAN'S
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(within the subject area covered by the database). To quote from their
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slide, "DISADVANTAGES: None". To open their talk, they went over the
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failure of Machine Translation in the 50's and early 60's, and how
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enormous amounts of world knowledge was necessary to correct the glaring
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deficiencies of those [20-year-old!] approaches. In their demonstration,
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they were following a fixed, prepared script (if you'll pardon the pun).
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Then it happened: when they said something about spelling correction, and
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how wonderfully better their program does it than anyone else's in the
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world, someone in the audience (a Houston bank officer, or something such)
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asked them to misspell "scale" as "scle" in the pending command. I sensed
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a distinct reluctance to try this (a [prepared] example in a subsequent
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query was promised), but they did it anyway. The resulting input was
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Use a scle of 1 inch to 2000 feet.
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The response was
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There are two states where Bibb county is located: Alabama and
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Georgia. Pick the state you mean.
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Wow! But the topper was the following: in the subsequent prepared query,
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there was a real ambiguity: the query mentioned Bibb County without
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specifying a state. The system responded with EXACTLY the same request
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for clarification -- which, in this new context, was precisely the right
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thing to do. Hmmmm....
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