This book contains the reports of selected projects involving natural language communication with pictorial information systems. More than just a record of research results, however, it presents concrete applications to the solution of a wide variety of problems. The authors are all prominent figures in the field whose authoritative contributions help ensure its continued expansion in both size and significance. Y. C. Lee and K S. Fu (Purdue University, USA) survey picture query languages which form an interface between the pictorial database system and the user and support information retrieval, data entry and manipulation, data analysis and output generation. They include explicit picture query languages that augment alphanumeric data query languages as well as languages and command sets which are implicitly embedded in a pictorial information system but perform similar functions. It is worth mentioning that some forms of query languages can be transformed from a given set of natural language sentences by using ATN (Augmented Transition Networks), which consequently allows for naturallanguage communication with information system.