Reply from Cognitive Systems
Shwartz@YALE.ARPA@sri-unix.uucp
The following is a response to the recent letter to the editor of
Psychology Today that was circulated on AI-List concerning a natural
language system developed by Cognitive Systems Inc. for an oil
company. It states that "[the Cognitive Systems program] is friendly
as long as you play by its rules and tell it what it expects to hear."
The system in question was not designed nor touted to be a general
natural language system. It was designed to understand and respond to
queries about oil wells and topographical maps, and within its
specified domain, it performs extremely well. This system has been
demonstrated at several conferences, most recently the Applied Natural
Language Conference in Santa Monica (February, 1983), where numerous
members of the academic community tested the system and were favorably
impressed.
It should be noted that the individual who wrote the letter was not
employed by either Cognitive Systems or the division of the oil
company which commissioned this program. In fact, he was a programmer
of the query language that the natural language front end was designed
to replace.