The Berkeley UNIX (Trademark) Consultant Project

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. Our hope was that the consultation task would requires us to address fundamental problems in natural language processing, planning and problem solving, and knowledge representation, all of which are of interest to us. We believe this to be the case because 1 the domain of an operating system is quite large and complex, 2 users conceptions of computer systems are often based on other domains, particularly space and containment, and 3 the structure of a consultation session requires the consultant to understand the users language, hypothesize his intentions, reason about the users problem, access knowledge about the topic in question, and formulation a reasonable response. In sum, virtually all the problems of language processing and reasoning arise in some fashion.