ASK is Transportable in Half a Dozen Ways

Abstract

This paper is an informal discussion of the technical issues and solutions encountered in making the ASK. System transportable. A natural language system can be "transportable" in a number of ways, Although transportability to a new domain is most prominent, other ways are also important if the system is to have viability in the commercial marketplace. "To transport" is a subcase of "to extend." To transport a system to a new domain is tantamount to starting with the system prior to adding any domain knowledge and extending it to incorporate the new domain. One may wish to add to a system that already has knowledge of one domain, the knowledge concerning a second domain, i.e., extend the system to cover this second domain. In the context of ASK, it has been natural to implement "extend", then achieve transportability as a special case. We consider six ways in which the ASK System can be extended to include new capabilities; --to a new domain --to a new object type --to access data from a foreign data base --to a new natural language --to a new programming language --to a new computer family