A natural language interface to planning systems

It is characteristic of the type of interaction that one would like to be able to have with a planner that the range and type of potential queries is not predictable in advance, and thus not reducible to choices within some predetermined set of options. Furthermore, it is often desirable to have the planner try out a range of hypothetical or counterfactual situations that could not be represented in any obvious graphical form. An interface to a planner therefore requires some kind of language, either artificial or natural. The paper describes work that has been carried out in investigating the use of natural language for this sort of interface