TORUS: a natural language understanding system for data management

TORUS is a natural language understanding system which serves as a front end to a data base management system in order to facilitate communication with a casual user and uses a semantic network for understanding each input statement and for deciding what information to output in response.

Abstract

This paper describes TORUS, a natural language system which serves as a front end to a data base management system in order to facilitate communication with a casual user. The system uses a semantic network for understanding each input statement and for deciding what information to output in response. The semantic network stores general knowledge about the problem domain, in this case student files and the educational process at the University of Toronto, along with specific information obtained during the dialogue with the user. A number of associated functions make it possible to integrate the meaning of an input statement to the semantic network, and to select a portion of the semantic network which stores information that must be output. A first version of TORUS has been implemented and is currently being tested.