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The Design of a Natural Language Interface for File System Operations on the Basis of a Structured Meanings Model
Due to evolutionary increase of the software complexity, graphical user interfaces have been becoming more and more complex, and often this process encounters the restricted possibilities of reflecting graphics on a display. This paper describes an original approach to designing natural language interfaces for the action-based applications as the complements and alternatives to traditional graphical interfaces. The principal peculiarity of this approach is that it is based on a formal model of natural language structured meanings. The first part of the paper outlines the main properties of the class of SK-languages (standard knowledge languages) which is used for building semantic representations of user commands. The class of SK-languages can be employed for representing the meanings of input texts from practically interesting sublanguages of Russian, English, French, German and other natural languages. The theory of K-representations (knowledge representations), introducing the class of SK-languages, was developed by V. A. Fomichov and described in his monograph published by Springer in 2010. The second part presents an application of this theory to the design of a natural language interface to an action-based software system, it is called NLC-1 (Natural Language Commander – Version 1).