Natural language systems: How are they meeting human needs?

One goal of natural language research is to make systems more accessible to their users by allowing them to interact with machines in a language as close as possible to the language people use among themselves. Developing systems that answer natural language questions is one way to allow users to interact easily with computers. In the following sections, I briefly describe ways in which researchers have been successful in this attempt, limitations inherent in existing natural language systems, and current efforts to bring systems closer to meeting the needs of their users. To illustrate these issues, I focus on natural language database systems as one example of question-answering systems.