Interacting with an intelligent planning system using English sentences

An intelligent planning system is an example of a software aid which, although developed by specialists in artificial intelligence and customised for a particular application by knowledge engineers, is intended eventually to be used by non-programmers for a wide variety of tasks. The aim of the project described is to experiment with the use of English language as the medium of communication. The overall system consists of: a natural language front end (NLFE), which produces logical forms (LF) representing the meaning of an input sentence; a plan query language evaluator (PQLE) which accepts inputs in a plan query language and evaluates them against an internal representation of the current plan, or by manipulating the planner itself to try to produce further plans; and the planner, a hand-crafted, domain specific planner written in Prolog. The NLFE, PQLE and planner are all separate processes, controlled by a `debugger´ interfaced to the Sun View Window system, enabling the course of operation of the system to be traced