Articles

Information retrieval systems that support searching of large textual databases are typically accessed by trained search intermediaries who provide assistance to end users in bridging the gap between the languages of authors and inquirers. We are building a thesaurus in the form of a large semantic network .to support interactive …...

This paper describes a domain independent strategy for the multimedia articulation of answers elicited by a natural language interface to database query ap- plications. Multimedia answers include videodisc im- ages and heuristically-produced complete sentences in text or text-to-speech form. Deictic reference and feedback about the discourse are enabled. The inter- …...

This paper describes a pilot version of a commercial application of natural language processing techniques to the problem of categorizing news stories into broad topic categories. The system does not perform a complete semantic or syntactic analyses of the input stories. Its categorizations are dependent on fragmentary recognition using pattern- …...

S OF CURRENT LITERATURE Single copies can be ordered from: D. Borchers University of Saarbruecken FB 10 Informatik IV Im Stadtwald 15 D-6600 Saarbruecken 11 Fed. Rep. of Germany Telephone: 0681/302-2363 NEW REPORTS AND MEMOS Report No. 5 Entworf eines aktiven, wissensbasierten Hilfesystems fuer SINIX. Kemke, C. Abridged version in …...

This paper is a critical evaluation of an approach to con- trol in natural language processing systems which makes use of canonical structures as a way of collapsing multiple analyses in individual components. We give an overview here of how the Lucy natural language interface system cur- rently realizes this …...

The disambiguation of sentences is a combinatorial problem. This paper describes a method for treating it as such, directly, by adapting standard combinatorial search optimizations. Traditional disambiguation heu- ristics are applied but, instead of being embedded in individual decision procedures for specific types of ambiguities, they contribute to numerical weights …...

Speech recognition systems incorporate a language model which, at each stage of the recognition task, assigns a probabil- ity of occurrence to each word in the vocabulary. A class of Mar- kov langnage models identified by Jclinek has achieved consider-. able success in this domain. A modification of the Markov …...

This paper describes a prototype news analysis system Which classifies and indexes news stories in real time. The system extracts stories from a newswire, parses the sentences of the story, and then maps the syntactic structures into a concept base. This process results in an index containing both ger~eral categories …...

The schema method is a framework for correcting grammatically ill-formed input. In a natural language processing system ill-formed input cannot be overlooked. A computer assisted instruction (CAD system, in particular, needs to show the user's errors. This framework diagnoses ill-formed input, corrects it and explains the error, if an input …...

In the present paper communicative cycle (CC) is considered as a dialog arising between two partners during solving a problem. Communicative strategy (C5) is seen as a general scheme by which a dialog participant is guided in achieving his goal. CC is described in terms of the goals of the …...

This paper presents the lexical component of the STAttT Ques- tion Answering system developed at the MIT Artificial Intelli- gence Laboratory. START is able to interpret correctly a wide range of semantic relationships associated with alternate expres- sions of the arguments of verbs. The design of the system takes advantage …...

The language of classical propositional iog- Ic is extended by functorial variables as a new syntactical category. Functorial vari- ables render to be a possible integrating representation of both assertion and presup- position in one and the same logical formula different from such using classical conjunc- tion. O~...

This paper proposes an efficient linguistic processing strategy for speech recognition and understanding using a dependency structure grammar. The strategy includes parsing and phrase prediction algorithms. After speech processing and phrase recognition based on phoneme recognition, the parser extracts the sentence with the best likelihood taking account of the phonetic …...

This paper describes a system for representing knowledge about conventional metaphors for use by natural language analysis, generation and acquisition systems. A system of hierarchically related structured associations is used. These associations are implemented as a part of the KODIAK representation language. Particular attention is paid in this paper to …...

A brief survey is conducted of the inheritance principle - the conveyance of properties between components within a hierarch- ical relational structure. The standard form of inheritance is con- sidered, using the subset (is-a) relation and highlighted as an example of downward inheritance. Downward inheritance is extended to specialisation of …...

This paper presents a network formalism for representing the meaning of noun phrases occurring in the context of intensional verbs such as seek and want. The basic assumption is that an intermediate representation is useful to carry out the interpretation process perspi- cuously. The proposed representation keeps apart de-re (transparent) …...

An efficient context-free parsing algorithm is presented that can parse sentences with unknown parts of unknown length. It pa'oduees in finite form all possible parses (of- ten infinite in number) that could account for the missing parts. The algorithm is a variation oa the construction due to Earley. ltowever, its …...

s: SAG~ (Sentence Analysis and GEneration system) is an operational parsing and generating system. It is used as a Natural Language Frontend for Esprit project Eeteam-316, whose purpose is to advise a novice user through a cooperative dialogue. The aim of our system is to validate the use of a …...

Much work in current research in the field of semantic - pragmatic analysis has been concerned with the interpre- tation of natural language utterances in the context of dialogs. In this paper, however, we will present methods for a primary pragmatic analysis of single utterances. Our investigations involve problems which …...

Viewing the syntactic analysis of natural language as a search problem, the right choice of parsing strategy plays an important role in the performance of natural language [arsers. After a motivatim: of the use of various heuristic criteria, a fl'amework for defining and testing par:;[ng strategies is presented. On this …...