For many years, I have been pursuing a long-range research objective in the area of natural language understanding for man-machine communication, an objective that I share with many of my colleagues. The objective is to develop the capability for people to interact directly in fluent natural language with a computer system for support of some decision making task they are involved in. Specifically, I am concerned with the use of natural language to manipulate data retrieval and display capabilities to enable a decision-maker to obtain a grasp of an overall situation in the face of an overwhelming availability of low level data. Such a system must give concise answers to specific high-level questions posed by the decision-maker within a small number of seconds in most cases.