Innovative learning capabilities in a natural language user interface for computer based measurement systems

The authors present a natural-language approach to the problem of the user-instrument interface. The goal of this approach is to give the final user not only full control over the available resources of a measurement system, but also the ability to create new resources without being compelled to know a programming language or take a training course. The authors have developed an interface with learning features and implemented a first version of it on a general-purpose personal computer. The interface has been designed not only to receive the user´s messages expressed in the nonrigorous form that is typical of human language and to execute them by means of the measurement routines available in the system, but also to learn new user ways of expressing commands, new measurement procedures, and new definitions of electrical quantities or mathematical functions. Three different types of learning which open a wide range of possible applications have been proposed