Productivity Engineering in the UNIX Environment. UNIX Consultant. A progress Report

We have been engaged in the construction of a system called UC, for UNIX Consultant. UC is designed to be an automated consultant that converses in natural language with naive users to help answer their questions about UNIX operating system. The intent is to provide a system that allows a naive user to ask questions about terminology, about command names and formats, for information concerning plans for doing things in UNIX, and for assistance in debugging problems with UNIX commands. UC should respond by explaining terminology, providing command names and describing their format, filling in the details of a user plan, suggesting plans to achieve goals, or engaging a user in a dialogue by requesting more information. To achieve this goal requires research into basic issues in natural language processing and common sense reasoning. Our research views the user as a planning agent who has goals implicity or explicitly expressed by his or her utterance. It is UCs task to determine the users goal and to aid the user by providing information for the achievement of those goals.