TY - JOUR AU - Glasgow, John C. PY - 1987/03/15 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Yanli: A Powerful Natural Language Front-End Tool JF - AI Magazine JA - AIMag VL - 8 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.1609/aimag.v8i1.573 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/573 SP - 40 AB - An important issue in achieving acceptance of computer systems used by the nonprogramming community is the ability to communicate with these systems in natural language. Often, a great deal of time in the design of any such system is devoted to the natural language front end. An obvious way to simplify this task is to provide a portable natural language front-end tool or facility that is sophisticated enough to allow for a reasonable variety of input; allows modification; and, yet, is easy to use. This paper describes such a tool that is based on augmented transition networks (ATNs). It allows for user input to be in sentence or nonsentence form or both, provides a detailed parse tree that the user can access, and also provides the facility to generate responses and save information. The system provides a set of ATNs or allows the user to construct ATNs using system utilities. The system is written in Franz Lisp and was developed on a DEC VAX 11/780 running the ULTRIX-32 operating system. ER -