Cooperative responses from a portable natural language query system

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of CO-OP, a natural language database query system that provides conversationally cooperative responses to natural language requests for data retrieval and operates with a typical CODASYL database management system. A conversationally cooperative response to a question is one which addresses the goals and intentions of the questioner while observing the conventions normally associated with discourse, to demonstrate that the chosen approach captures some fundamental properties of conversational cooperation, CO-OP was designed to be portable to new database domains with a minimum of effort—the lexicon and database itself are the only sources of domain specific knowledge. A limited theory of cooperative behavior in question-answering is informally presented, and a practical technique for applying this theory in a natural language query system is described. Sample transcripts of the system that illustrate cooperative responses in two contrasting applications are given.