A Natural Language Interface for Real-Time Dialogue in the Flight Domain

A flight expert system (FLES) is being developed [1-7] to assist pilots in monitoring, diagnosing and recovering from in-flight faults. To provide a communications interface between the flight crew and FLES, a natural language interface (NALI) has been implemented. Input to NALI is processed by three processors: 1) the semantic parser, 2) the knowledge retriever, and 3) the response generator. The architecture of NALI has been designed to process both temporal and non-temporal queries. Provisions have also been made to reduce the number of system modifications required for adapting NALI to other domains. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of NALI.