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SIGART Chicago

June, 1995

News of the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence 
of the Chicago Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery

NEWS AND NOTES

Please note this seasons meeting dates on your calendar now so 
you wont miss a single meeting:

        June 1 -- Building Natural Language Interfaces.
        September 7 -- To be announced.
        December 7 -- To be announced.

Our June meeting promises to be very interesting.  The topic, 
natural language interfaces, is a fertile one for research.  There 
have also been some commercial successes in this area in limited 
domains. During this talk we will see the Index Concept Parsing 
program demonstrated.

Special thanks to Marcia Richards Suelzer for her presentation 
on Developing a Legal Expert System, presented at the March 
meeting.

June Meeting Announcement
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Building Natural Language Interfaces -- Can We Talk?
by Will Fitzgerald

Abstract:

One of the recurring goals for computers is to be able to 
interact with them as naturally, quickly and effectively as 
we do with people. One way to do so is to add natural language 
interfaces to application programs.  Unfortunately, adding 
natural language capabilities to applications can require 
intensive effort in knowledge representation. But building 
an effective natural language interface can be done practically, 
at least for some types of applications. A new architecture for 
natural language processing, Index Concept Parsing, has allowed
us to add natural language interfaces to a number of programs 
at the Institute for the Learning Sciences.  Among these 
programs are a biology tutor, a learning environment for 
training customer service representatives, a large collection 
of stories from Desert Storm/Desert Shield, and (currently) a 
training environment for negotiation.

This talk will:
 - describe the challenges inherent in natural language processing,
 - describe Index Concept Parsing and how it meets these challenges,
 - show running examples of Index Concept Parsers.

The techniques and architectures described can be used in a 
large number of settings.


SPEAKER:

Will Fitzgerald is a Research Associate at the Institute for 
the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.  He recently 
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern. Will's
research interests include natural language processing, 
human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, intelligent
documents, and computational models of planning.


Meeting Details

Date: Thursday, June 1, 1995
Time: 5:30 p.m. Refreshments & Snacks; 6:30 p.m. Speaker
Place: IIT's Chicago Kent Law School
       565 West Adams St., Chicago
Cost: $6.00 Members; $8.00 Non-Members; $3.00 Students
Reservations: Call John Garton at Byte Knights, (312) 327-9250. 
Please DO try to make a reservation, it really helps us plan 
the meeting space and refreshments. Information: Call John 
Garton, (312) 327-9250.


Travel Directions to SIGART Meeting
Via Metra: Use Union Street Station. Walk West on Adams St.
Via CTA:   Take Ravenswood, Evanston, or Midway trains to 
           Adams St.  Walk West on Adams St.
Via Bus:   41, 60, 125, 151, 156, 157 to Union Station.  
           Walk West on Adams St.
Via Car:   Kennedy/Dan Ryan to Monroe exit.  Go East to 
           Clinton, South to Adams.  On street parking is 
           limited.  There are several parking lots in the
           area.
Walking:   Walk West from the Loop on Adams.

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