HCI: a cognitive neural net prospectus

If neural nets are to have a future, and if the notion that they succeed where conventional artificial intelligence has failed is to be substantiated, they will have to be effective in improving the human computer interface. The key factor is their potential contribution to areas of language and scene understanding which will allow natural language (not necessarily speech) to be used as part of the interface. The authors present a `gedanken experiment´ of the way that a neural system will have to be designed and to operate in a very simple demonstrator task: getting a vision system to respond linguistically to a `natural language´ request based on a visual input