Articles

A prerequisite to a theory of the way agents un- derstand speech acts is a theory of how their be- liefs and intentions are revised as a consequence of events. This process of attitude revision is an interesting domain for the application of non- monotonic reasoning because speech acts have …...

An English-Japanese bi-directional machine translation system was connected to a keyboard conversation function on a workstation, and tested via a satellite link with users in Japan and Switzerland. The set-up is described, and some informal observations on the nature of the bilin- gual dialogues reported....

This paper presents a unification-based approach to Japanese honorifics based on a version of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar)ll]121. Utterance parsing is based on lexical specifications of each lexical item, including honorifics, and a few general PSG rules using a parser capable of unifying cyclic feature structures. It is shown …...

Narrative passages told from a character's perspective convey the character's thoughts and perceptions. We present a discourse process that recognizes characters' thoughts and perceptions in third-person narrative. An effect of perspective on reference In narrative is addressed: references in passages told from the perspec- tive of a character reflect the …...

We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse struc- ture. We applied control criteria to four di- alognes and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control between these structures and found that utterance type and not cue words predicted shifts …...

The inquiry semantics approach of the Nigel compu- tational systemic grammar of English has proved capa- ble of revealing distinctions within propositional con- tent that the text planning process needs to control in order for adequate text to be generated. An extension to the chooser and inquiry framework motiwLted by …...

Computational approaches to discourse understanding have a two-part goal: (1) to identify those aspects of discourse understanding that require process-based accounts, andS(2) to characterize the processes and data structures they involve. To date, in the area of reference, process-hased ac.omnts have been developed for subsequent reference via anaphoric pronouns and …...

An approach to abductive inference developed in the TAC- ITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described and illustrated. It also suggests an …...

Parsing techniques based on rules defining grammaticality are difficult to use with authentic inputs, which are often grammatically messy. Instead, the APRIL system seeks a labelled tree su~cture which maximizes a numerical measure of conformity to statistical norms derived flom a sample of parsed text. No distinction between legal and …...

We propose that logic (enhanced to encode probability information) is a good way of characterizing semantic in- terpretation. In support of this we give a fragment of an axiomatization for word-sense disambiguation, noun- phrase (and verb) reference, and case disambiguation. We describe an inference engine (Frail3) which actually takes this …...

We report on a mechanism for semantic and prag- matic interpretation that has been designed to take advantage of the generally compositional na- ture of semantic analysis, without unduly con- straining the order in which pragmatic decisions are made. To achieve this goal, we introduce the idea of a conditional …...

SEAFACT (Semantic Analysis For the Animation of Cooking Tasks) is a natural language interface to a computer-generated animation system operating in the domain of cooking tasks. SEAFACT allows the user to specify cooking tasks "using a small subset of English. The system analyzes English input and pro- duces a representation …...

An analysis of English tense and aspect is pre- sented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence …...

We discuss the techniques we have developed and implemented for the cross-categorial treatment of comparatives in TELl, a natural language question- answering system that's transportable among both application domains and types of backend retrieval systems. For purposes of illustration, we shall consider the example sentences "List the cars at least …...

An algorithm for generating the possible quanti- fier scopings for a sentence, in order of preference, is outlined. The scoping assigned to a quantifier is determined by its interactions with other quan- tifiers, modals, negation, and certain syntactic- constituent boundaries. When a potential scoping is logically equivalent to another, the …...

We present a computational treatment of the semantics of plural Noun Phrases which extends an earlier approach presented by Scha [7] to be able to deal with multiple-level plurals ("the boys and the girls", "the juries and the committees", etc.) 1 We ar- gue that the arbitrary depth to which …...

This paper describes an analysis of telegraphic fragments as regular structures (not errors) han- dled by rn~n~nal extensions to a system designed for processing the standard language. The modu- lar approach which has been implemented in the Unlsys natural language processing system PUNDIT is based on a division of labor …...

A word-based morphological analyzer and a dic- tionary for recognizing inflected forms of French words have been built by adapting the UDICI" system. We describe the adaptations, emphasiz- ing mechanisms developed to handle French verbs. This work lays the groundwork for doing French derivational morphology and morphology for other languages. …...

In this paper we describe an implemented program for localizing the expression of many types of syntactic am- biguity, in the logical forms of sentences, in a manner convenient for subsequent inferential processing. Among the types of ambiguities handled are prepositional phrases, very compound nominals, adverbials, relative clatmes, and preposed …...

The Nabu morphological processor is designed to perform a number of different func- tions, of which five have so far been identified: analysis, guessing (about unknown words), syn- thesis, defaulting (proposing the most likely in- flectional paradigm for a new base form), and coding (producing all possible inflectional paradigm variants …...