New Life for Intellect?

AICorp, best known in NLP circles as the developer of the natural language interface package Intellect, has merged with Aion, its primary competitor. The two companies, both prominent vendors of knowledge-base software, will continue under a new, as yet unannounced name, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Intellect, one of the very first commercial applications of natural language processing, is the brainchild of AICorp’s Technical Director Larry Harris. Discussing Intellect at his company’s Waltham, Massachusetts (USA), offices earlier this year, the former Dartmouth University professor explained that his concept for a natural language query tool grew out of NLP research being carried on at Cornell University at the end of the 1970s and represented a synthesis of advancements in natural language understanding and database technology. Because a conventional database forces you to define and limit the semantics of your data, it became obvious to Harris that this restricted domain would be ideally suited to further processing using the AI techniques emerging at the time, which were – and still are – largely concerned with the semantics of natural language. Intellect accepts free-form English input, parses it, displays its reading of the query, and translates it into SQL, the standard database query language. Upon receiving the results of the query, it will generate a natural language reply.
    Harris reviewed some of the package’s various applications, ranging from its earliest users in the financial and chemical sectors right up to its recent “deployment” during Operation Desert Shield (for materials management) and the Iran/Contra affair (for a who-what-where-and-when database). Speaking of the latter two applications, Harris says the speed with which such applications can be set up and used demonstrates the strength of the package: its simplicity. No linguistic knowledge is required; a user simply sets up a table pointing to a database and begins entering concepts. Synonyms can be added on the fly. Harris contrasts this with similar products, where “you have to be a computational linguist” to build an application. Among its many uses, Intellect has found particular favor in the human resource departments of companies and organizations, where users need to make frequent ad hoc queries in personnel files containing a wide diversity of data.

Expert system programming
While a natural language interface has obvious advantages for the casual and non-technical user, Harris says it has proven even more beneficial to the programmer. When AICorp started shipping its Knowledge Base Management System ( KBMS), the company included Intellect as a development tool in the form of “a natural language debugging window.” As Harris explains, “some of the most enthusiastic Intellect users have been our KBMS developers. They’ve discovered that natural language has tremendous value for ‘visualizing’ the system’s rule-based declarative language.” .
    Harris acknowledges that while his company has enjoyed a moderate level of success with Intellect (counting KBMS licensees, there are an estimated 700 Intellect sites worldwide), the market for natural language products has not reached its full potential. Upon mention of LanguageAccess, IBM’s nl interface product, Harris exclaims that he would “love to see it succeed.” Presumably even IBM’s competitors in this field would benefit from such a success.
    Jan Aikins, founder and vice president of technology development of Aion, says she will be working with Larry Harris to plan further development of Intellect. She speaks optimistically about the possibility “of other natural language offshoots from our [combined] product line.”

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