Articles

The design, implementation, and use of grammar for- ma]isms for natural language have constituted a major branch of coml)utational linguistics throughout its devel- opment. By viewing grammar formalisms as just a spe- cial ease of computer languages, we can take advantage of the machinery of denotational semantics to provide a …...

This paper surveys some issues that arise in the study of the syntax and semantics of natural languages (NL's) and have potential relevance to the automatic recognition, parsing, and translation of NL's. An attempt is made to take into account the fact that parsing is scarcely ever thought about with …...

This paper presents extensions to the work of Bobrow and Webber [Bobrow&Webber 80a, Bobrow&Webber 80b] on semantic interpretation using KL-ONE to represent knowledge. The approach is based on an extended case frame formalism applicable to all types of phrases, not just clauses. The frames are used to recognize semantically acceptable …...

Sublanguages _differ from each other, and from the "stan- dard Ian~age, in their syntactic, semantic, and discourse vrolx:rties. Understanding these differences is important'if -we are to improve our ability to process these sublanguages. We have developed a sen~.'- automatic ~ure for identifying sublangnage syntact/c usage from a sample of text …...

The paper begins by defining a class of distributed memory machines which have useful properties as retrieval and filtering devices. These memory mechanisms store large numbers of associations on a single composite vector. They provide a natural format for encoding the syntactic and semantic constraints associated with linguistic elements. A …...

The GTI~syst~m is a tree-to-tree transducer developed for teaching purposes in machine transla- tion. The transducer is a specialized production system giving the linguists the tools for express- ing infon~ation in a syntax that is close to theo- retical linguistics. Major emphasis was placed on developing a system that is …...

This paper pinpoints some of the problems faced when a computer text production model (COMMENTATOR) is to produce spontaneous speech, in particular the problem of chunking the utterances in order to get natural prosodic units. The paper proposes a buffer model which allows the accumula- tion and delay of phonetic …...

We discuss how a deductive question-answering sys- tem can represent the beliefs or other cognitive states of users, of other (interacting) systems, and of itself. In particular, we examine the representation of first-person beliefs of others (e.g., the ~/v.~'~ representation of a user'A belief that he himself is rich). Such …...

This paper presents a prototype, not com- pletely operational, that is intended to use c-graphs in the translation of assemblers. Firstly, the formalization of the structure and its princi- pal notions (substructures, classes of substruc- tures, order, etc.) are presented. Next section de- scribes the prototype which is based on …...

This paper describes a general approach to the design of natural language interfaces that has evolved during the development of DATALOG, an Eng- lish database query system based on Cascaded ATN grammar. By providing separate representation schemes for linguistic knowledge, general world knowledge, and application domain knowledge, DATALOG achieves a …...

The Layered Domain Class system (LDC) is an experimental natural language processor being developed at Duke University which reached the prototype stage in May of 1983. Its primary goals are (I) to provide English-language retrieval capabilities for structured but unnormaUzed data files created by the user, (2) to allow very …...

While both theoretical and empirical studies of question- answering have revealed the inadequacy of traditional definitions of Ve*-no questions (YNQs), little progress has been made toward a more satisfactory redefinition. This paper reviews the limitations of several proposed revisions. It proposes a new definition of YNQs baaed upon research on …...

The paper discusses the linguistic aspects of a new gen- eral purpose facility for computing with features. The pro- gram was developed in connection with the course I taught at the University of Texas in the fall of 1983. It is a general- ized and expanded version of a system …...

f An entity-oriented approach to restricted-domain parsing is proposed, In this approach, the definitions of the structure and surface representation of domain entities are grouped together. Like semantic grammar, this allows easy exploitation of limited dolnain semantics. In addition, it facilitates fragmentary recognition and the use of multiple parsing strategies, …...

In order to represent speech acts, in a multi-agent context, we choose a knowledge representation based on the modal logic of knowledge KT4 which is defined by Sato. Such a formalism allows us to reason about know- ledge and represent knowledge about knowled- ge, the notions of truth value and …...

An utterance may be syntactically and semant- Ically well-formed yet violate the pragmatic rules of the world model. This paper presents a context-based strateEy for constructing a coopera- tive but limited response to pragmatlcally ill- formed queries. Sug~estlon heuristics use a con- text model of the speaker's task inferred from …...

This paper proposes a method for organizing linguistic knowledge in both systematic and flexible fashion. We introduce a purely applicative language (PAL) as an intermediate representation and an object-oriented computation mechanism for its interpretation. PAL enables the establishment of a principled and well-constrained method of interaction among lexicon-oriented linguistic modules. …...

In a well-structured Lexica] Data Base, a number of relations among lexica] entries can he interactively evidenced. The present article examines hyponymy, as an example of paradigmatic relation, and "restriction" relation, as a syntagmatic relation. The theoretical results of their implementation are illustrated. I...

A proper treatment of syntax and semantics in machine translation is introduced and discussed from the empirical viewpoint. For English- Japanese machine translation, the syntax directed approach is effective where the Heuristic Parsing Model (HPM) and the Syntactic Role System play important roles. For Japanese-English translation, the semantics directed approach …...

This paper present a new method for parsing English sentences. The parser called LUTE-EJ parser is combined with case analysis and ATNG-based analysis. LUTE-EJ parser has two interesting mechanical characteristics. One is providing a structured buffer, Structured Constituent Buffer, so as to hold previous fillers for a case structure, instead …...