TORUS: A step towards bridging the gap between data bases and the casual user

This paper describes TORUS, a natural language understanding system that serves as a front end to a data base management system in order to facilitate communication with casual users. The system employs a semantic network to store knowledge about a data base of student files. This knowledge is used to find the meaning of each input statement, to decide what action to take with respect to the data base, and to select information that must be output in response to the input statement. A prototype version of TORUS has been implemented.