The Berkeley UNIX Consultant Project

Abstract

UC (UNIX Consultant) is an intelligent, natural language interface that allows naive users to learn about the UNIX 2 operating system. UC was undertaken because the task was thought to be both a fertile domain for artificial intelligence (AI) research and a useful application of AI work in planning, reasoning, natural language processing, and knowledge representation. The current implementation of UC comprises the following components: a language analyzer, called ALANA, produces a representation of the content contained in an utterance; an inference component, called a concretion mechanism, that further refines this content; a goal analyzer, PAGAN, that hypothesizes the plans and goals under which the user is operating; an agent, called UCEgo, that decides on UC's goals and proposes plans for them; a domain planner, called KIP, that computes a plan to address the user's request; an expression mechanism, UCExpress, that determines the content to be communicated to the user, and a language production mechanism, UCGen, that expresses UC's response in English. UC also contains a component, called KNOME, that builds a model of the user's knowledge state with respect to UNIX. Another mechanism, UCTeacher, allows a user to add knowledge of both English vocabulary and facts about UNIX to UC's knowledge base. This is done by interacting with the user in natural language. All these aspects of UC make use of knowledge represented in a knowledge representation system called KODIAK. KODIAK is a relation-oriented system that is intended to have wide representational range and a clear semantics, while maintaining a cognitive appeal. All of UC's knowledge, ranging from its most general concepts to the content of a particular utterance, is represented in KODIAK. Several years ago, we began a project called UC (UNIX Consultant). UC was to function as an intelligent, natural language interface that would allow naive users to learn about the UNIX operating system by interacting with the consultant in ordinary English. We sometimes refer to UC as "an intelligent 'help' facility" to emphasize our intention to construct a consultation system, rather than a natural language front end to an operating system. Whereas front ends generally take the place of other interfaces, UC was intended to help the user learn how to use an existing one. We had two major motivations for choosing this task. These can be summarized by saying that we believed the task to be both interesting and doable. It seemed to us that much natural language work indeed, much of AI research-has fallen into two largely non-intersecting categories: On the one hand, there are quite interesting and ambitious projects that have been more the fertile source of exciting speculations than of useful technology. In contrast, there are projects whose scope is severely limited, either to some intrinsically bounded, real-world task or to a laboratory microworld. These projects result in much excitement by the production of a working system or successful technology. But such projects ...

Computer Understanding of Conventional Metaphoric Language

“…Two basic inference processes are used, either separately or in tandem, to accomplish this interpretation task; these are concretion (Norvig, 1987;Wilensky, 1986;Wilensky et al, 1988) and metaphoric unviewing (Martin, 1988;Wilensky, 1989). Briefly, concretion is a kind of specialization inference that replaces an abstract concept by a more well specified concept.…”

“…In order to make the problem of understanding metaphors more concrete, consider the implications of Examples 1 through 3 for a system like the UNIX Consultant (Wilensky, Arens, & Chin, 1984;Wilensky et al, 1988). UC is a natural language consultant system that provides naive computer users with advice on how to use the UNIX operating system.…”

Plan Realization for Complex Command Interaction in the UNIX Help Domain

“…In particular, we propose that a single "back-end" knowledge base about UNIX can be be used to support a variety of user interfaces of varying form and sophistication. We note that this philosophy is completely opposite to that employed in the UC natural-language consultation system (Wilensky et al, 1988), in which linguistic knowledge and domain knowledge about UNIX are contained in a common knowledge base.…”

“…Genereseth's MACSYMA Advisor (Genesereth, 1979) is perhaps the prototypical example of such a utility. In this regard Yucca-* is similar to the UC UNIX consultation system (Wilensky et al, 1984), (Wilensky et al, 1988). Because such facilities typically provide help only when it is explicitly requested, they are sometimes termed passive assistants.…”

A Question Answering System for the Operation of Software Applications

“…The Berkeley UNIX Consultant project [9], which is an AIoriented system, uses a knowledge base to answer questions with respect to UNIX commands. The Dialog Navigator [4], which is an NLP/IR-oriented system, searches a collection of Microsoft support documents for one or more documents in which a number of dictionaries are used to match a particular question and the documents.…”