This book contains the reports of selected projects involving natural language commu­ nication with pictorial information systems. More than just a record of research results, however, it presents concrete applications to the solution of a wide variety of problems. The authors are all prominent figures in the field whose authoritative contributions help ensure its continued expansion in both size and significance. Y. C. Lee and K S. Fu (Purdue University, USA) survey picture query languages which form an interface between the pictorial database system and the user and support infor­ mation retrieval, data entry and manipulation, data analysis and output generation. They include explicit picture query languages that augment alphanumeric data query langua­ ges as well as languages and command sets which are implicitly embedded in a pictorial information system but perform similar functions. It is worth mentioning that some forms of query languages can be transformed from a given set of natural language senten­ ces by using ATN (Augmented Transition Networks), which consequently allows for na­ turallanguage communication with information system.

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