The Dialoguer: an interactive bilingual interface to a network operating system
We have developed a bilingual interface to the Novell network operating system, called the Dialoguer. This system carries on a conversation with the user in Arabic or English or a combination of the two and attempts to help the user use the Novell network operating system. Learning to use an operating system is a major barrier in starting to use computers. There is no single standard for operating systems which makes it difficult for novice users to learn a new operating system. With the proliferation of client-server environments, users will eventually end up using one network operating system or another. These problems motivated our choice of an area to work in and they have made it easy to find real users to test our system. This system is both an expert system and a natural language interface. The system embodies expert knowledge of the operating system commands and of a large variety of plans that the user may want to carry out. The system also contains a natural language understanding component and a response generation component. The Dialoguer makes extensive use of case frame tables in both components. Algorithms for handling a bilingual dialogue are one of the important contributions of this paper along with the Arabic case frames.
bilingual interface network operating system case frame operating system interface arabic language processing