The ROBOT System

Abstract

In the early 1970's the natural language processing techniques developed within the field of artificial intelligence (AI) made important progress. Within certain restricted micro worlds of discourse it became possible to process a reasonably large class of English. These techniques have now been applied to the real micro world of data base query, allowing for information to be extracted from data bases by asking ordinary English questions. This paper discusses the importance of true natural language data base query and describes the ROBOT system, a high performance production level system already installed in several real world environments. The specific data structure requirements of the ROBOT system are discussed, as well as an extended type of data inversion that provides precisely the functionality required by the natural language parser.