...be glad your version doesn't do this.

[ARENS at USC-ECLC.ARPA]

From:  Yigal Arens <ARENS at USC-ECLC.ARPA>

In his message about the June CACM article about the Unix Consultant system,
Marty Lyons demonstrates that he either misunderstood or simply did not read
the article in its entirety.

Below are the paragraphs preceding and following the two lines he quoted.
I believe this will clarify any misunderstanding.

  "A useful natural language interface must also incorporate some processes
   that may be collectively referred to as common-sense reasoning.  To
   demonstrate the importance of such extra-linguistic mechanisms, consider
   the following hypothetical dialogue with a naive interface (NI).  We
   assume here that NI possesses knowledge about a language's syntactic and
   semantic conventions, but is not otherwise an intelligent system:

	User: I'm trying to get some more disk space.
	NI:   Type 'rm *'

  "NI's suggestion, if executed by the user, would destroy all the user's
   files.  This rather disturbing response might be generated by a naive
   interface because the response fulfills the user's literal request for
   more disk space.  However, the answer lacks a certain cooperative spirit.
   A more felicitous answer might be "Delete all the files you don't need"
   or "Ask the system manager for some more storage."  However, in order to
   prefer these responses over the above, the interface must be able to
   infer that the user possesses some goals other than the one stated in the
   request, and that these background goals interact with the request to
   constrain the beneficial courses of action."


Yigal Arens
USC
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