In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) strategy envisages a world where models play a more direct role in software production, being amenable to manipulation and transformation by machine. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is wider in scope than MDA. MDE combines process and analysis with architecture. This article sets out a framework for model driven engineering, which can be used as a point of reference for activity in this area. It proposes an organisation of the modelling 'space' and how to locate models in that space. It discusses different kinds of mappings between models. It explains why process and architecture are tightly connected. It discusses the importance and nature of tools. It identifies the need for defining families of languages and transformations, and for developing techniques for generating/configuring tools from such definitions. It concludes with a call to align metamodelling with formal language engineering techniques.

Model Driven Engineering

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

Database management systems will continue to manage large data volumes. Thus, efficient algorithms for accessing and manipulating large sets and sequences will be required to provide acceptable performance. The advent of object-oriented and extensible database systems will not solve this problem. On the contrary, modern data models exacerbate the problem: In order to manipulate large sets of complex objects as efficiently as today's database systems manipulate simple records, query-processing algorithms and software will become more complex, and a solid understanding of algorithm and architectural issues is essential for the designer of database management software. This survey provides a foundation for the design and implementation of query execution facilities in new database management systems. It describes a wide array of practical query evaluation techniques for both relational and postrelational database systems, including iterative execution of complex query evaluation plans, the duality of sort- and hash-based set-matching algorithms, types of parallel query execution and their implementation, and special operators for emerging database application domains.

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Query evaluation techniques for large databases

Systems and methods are provided for receiving speech and non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands, transcribing the speech and non-speech communications to textual messages, and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention applies context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for one or more users presenting questions or commands across multiple domains. The systems and methods creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech and non-speech communications and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

Systems and methods for responding to natural language speech utterance

A system for interactively generating a natural-language input interface, without any computer-skill programming work being required. The natural-language menu interface thus generated provides a menu-selection technique whereby a totally unskilled computer user, who need not even be able to type, can access a relational or hierarchical database, without any possibility of error. That is, the user addresses commands to the database system simply by selecting words from an appropriate menu of words which could legally follow in commands, so that the user inputs commands which are phrased entirely in English, and these commands cannot be misunderstood by the database system. The present invention provides an automatic interactive system whereby such an interface is constructed. The database is itself loaded in, and the interactive interface-construction system then addresses a series of queries to the user's technical expert, in response to which the user must classify, which tables in the database are to be used, which attributes of particular tables in the database are key attributes, and, in particular, what the various connections between tables in the database are and what natural-language connecting phrases will describe those relations.

Natural-language interface generating system

A system and method for database management for providing support for long-term storage and retrieval of objects created by application programs written at least in part in object-oriented programming languages consists of a plurality of software modules. These modules provide data definition language translation, object management, object translation, and persistent object storage service. Such system implements an object fault capability to reduce the number of interactions between the application, the database management system, and the database.

A system and method for database management supporting object-oriented programming

An object-oriented query language apparatus and method provides data abstraction, seamlessness with respect to the host programming language, set support orthogonal to persistence and strong typing. Such apparatus for processing queries includes a preprocessor to parse, optimize, and translate object query language statements into efficient host language statements, connected to a compiler that compiles such host language statements into executable code. Therefore, by inputting a program containing statements using a host language's type system as well as employing the host language's expressions, object composition, and inheritance in the formulation of queries, and by combining the Select-From-Where style of Standard Query Language as a basic structure for query statements with the set-valued function of the host language as targets for those queries, an associative query capability is added to a host programming language, thereby improving its versatility and functionality.

Apparatus and method for adding an associative query capability to a programming language

A method for a guided natural language interface includes inputting to a thin client a query, communicating to an interface intermediary, communicating to an interface descriptor data source, generating an interface descriptor, communicating the interface descriptor to the interface intermediary, communicating the interface descriptor to a parser farm, requesting an appropriate parser corresponding to the interface descriptor, assigning an appropriate parser, parsing, communicating a translation from the step of parsing, to the interface intermediary, and communicating the translation to the thin client. The thin client can be geographically remote from any or all of the steps other than the step of inputting, such that the method is performed over a disparate enterprise, such as a network, for example, the Internet.

Guided natural language interface system and method

Using natural language to communicate with computers remains a grand-challenge question. The authors LingoLogic interface technology can be seen as a widely useful human interface technology that can extend the semantic Web.

Craig W. Thompson

Papers

Natural-language interface generating system

A system and method for database management supporting object-oriented programming

Apparatus and method for adding an associative query capability to a programming language

Guided natural language interface system and method

Talk to your semantic Web