Progress in Natural Language Query in Macsyma
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          by Richard Petti
          President, Macsyma Inc.

For most users, the critical issue for using math software is ease of use.
Help systems and other factors affecting ease of use will be reviewed, with
emphasis on features of Macsyma(R) and PDEase(R).

Macsyma 2.2 includes the Mathtips(tm) natural language query capability.  Users
can describe their problems in their own words, and Macsyma responds with a
number of suggestions, or "tips".  Each "tip" consists of a terse verbal
description of a mathematical task, a short example problem and a proposed
solution which the user can execute without typing anything.

Time permitting, I will mention some of the progress in mathematical
capabilities of Macsyma.