TUGA is a program which converses in Portuguese to
provide a library service covering the field of
Artificial Intelligence. The objective of designing the program TUGA was the
development of a feasible method for consulting and
creating data bases in natural Portuguese. The resulting program allows dialogues where the
program and its users behave in the way humans normally
do in a dialogue setting. The program can answer/ and
question in pre-defined scenarios. Users can question/
answer and issue commands in a natural and convenient
way/ without bothering excessively with the form of the
dialogues and sentences. The original contributions of this work are: the
treatment of dialogues. the adaptation of Colmerauer's
natural language framework to Portuguese, the particular
method for evaluating the logical structures involved in
Colmerauer's framework, and the library service
application itself. The program is implemented in Prolog, a simple and
surprisingly powerful programming language essentially
identical in syntax and semantics to a subset of
predicate calculus in clausal form
