Articles

Informally, a disposition is a proposition which is prepon- derantly, but no necessarily always, true. For example, birds can fly is a disposition, as are the propositions Swedes are blond and Spaniards are dark. An idea which underlies the theory described in this paper is that a disposition may be …...

One of the promising approaches to analyzing task- oriented dialogues has involved modeling the plans of the speakers in the task domain. In general, these models work well as long as the topic follows the task structure closely, but they have difficulty in accounting for clarification subdialogues and topic change. …...

Cognitive principles underlying the (re-)construc- tion of word meaning and/or world knowledge struc- tures are poorly understood yet. In a rather sharp departure from more orthodox lines of introspective acquisition of structural data on meaning and know- ledge representation in cognitive science, an empi- rical approach is explored that analyses …...

Analysts grammar of Japanese tn the Mu-proJect ts presented, It is emphasized that rules expressing constraints on stngle linguistic structures and rules for selecting the most preferable readtngs are completely different In nature, and that rules for selecting preferale readings should be utilized tn analysts grammars of practical HT systems. …...

lr: this paper, we approach the problem of organisation and control ip. automatic speech understanding systems firaT.ly, by presentin~ a theory of the non-serial interactions "~eces';ary between two processors in the system; namely, the morphosyntaetic and the prosodic, and secondly, by showing how, when generalised, this theory allows one to …...

This paper presents a model for deterministic parsing which was designed to simplify the task of writing and understanding a deterministic grammar. While retaining structures and operations similar to those of Mareus's PARSIFAL parser [Marcus 80] the grammar language incorporates the following changes. (1) The use of productions operating in …...

The paper presents an algorithm, written in PROLOG, for processing English sentences which contain either Gapping, Right Node Raising (RNR) or Reduced Conjunction (RC). The DCG (Definite Clause Grammar) formalism (Pereira & Warren 80) is adopted. The algorithm is highly efficient and capable of processing a full range of coordinate …...

Starting from the assumption that machine translation (MT) should be based on theoretically sound grounds, we argue that, given the state of the art, the only viable solution for the designer of software tools for MT, is to provide the linguists building the MT system with a generator of highly …...

Tills paper describes a computational method for correcting users' miseonceptioas concerning the objects modelled by a compute," s.ystem. The method involves classifying object-related misc,mce|,tions according to the knowledge-base feature involved in the incorrect information. For each resulting class sub-types are identified, :.:cording to the structure of the knowledge base, which …...

Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory is a major breakthrough regarding the systematic translation of natural language discourse into logical form. We have therefore chosen to marry the User Specialty Languages System, which was originally designed as a natural language frontend to a relational database system, with this new theory. In the …...

This paper presents a semantically oriented, rule based method for single sentence text generation and discusses its implementation in the Kafka generator. This generator is part of the XCALIBUR natural language interface developed at CMU to provide natural language facilities for a wide range of expert systems and data bases. …...

Th=s report describes Paul, a computer text generation system desig~ed LO create cohesive text through the use o| lexlcal substitutions. Specihcally, Ihas system is designed Io determmistically choose between provluminahzat0on, superordinate suhstntut0on, and dehmte noun phrase reiterabon. The system identities a strength el antecedence recovery for each of the lex~cal …...

KIPS is an automatic programming system which generates standardized business application programs through interactive natural language dialogue. KIPS models the program under discussion and the content of the user's statements as organizations of dynamic objects in the object*oriented programming sense. This paper describes the statement*model and the program-model, their use …...

A considerable body of accumulated knowledge about the design of languages for communicating information to computers has been derived from the subfields of program- ming language design and semantics. It has been the goal of the PArR group at SRI to utilize a relevant portion of this knowledge in implementing …...

Most linguistic studies of human-computer communication have focused on the issues of syntax and discourse structure. However, another interesting and important area is the lexical semantics of command languages. The names that users and system designers give the objects and actions of a computer system can greatly affect its usability, …...

MLR, an extended LR parser, is introduced, and its application to natural language parsing is discussed. An LR parser is a ~;hift-reduce parser which is doterministically guided by a parsing table. A parsing table can be obtained automatically from a context- free phrase structure grammar. LR parsers cannot manage antl)iguous …...

Acquisition of phonological systems can be insightfully studied in terms of discovery procedures. This paper describes a discovery procedure, implemented in Lisp, capable of deter- mining a set of ordered phonological rules, which may be in opaque contexts~ from a set of surface forms arranged in para- digms. 1....

1 Practical natural language interfaces must exhibit robust bei~aviour in the presence of extragrammaticat user input. This paper classifies different types of grammatical deviations and related phenomena at the lexical and sentential levels, discussing recovery strategies tailored to specific phenomena in the classification. Such strategies constitute a tool chest of …...

In this paper we argue that natural language inter- faces to databases should be able to produce summary responses as well as listing actual data. We describe a system (incorporating a number of heuristics and a knowledge base built on top of the database) that has been developed to generate …...

This paper proposes a system of map- ping classes of syntactic structures as instruments for automatic text under- standing. The system illustrated in Japa- nese consists of a set of verb classes and information on mapping them together with noun phrases, tense and aspect. The sys- tem. having information on …...