Articles

This contribution attempts a conceptual and practical...

A description will be given of a procedure to asslgn the most likely probabilitles to each of the rules of a given context-free grammar. The grammar devel- oped by S. Kuno at Harvard University was picked as the basis and was successfully augmented with rule probabilities. A brief exposition of …...

Nowadays it is common the construction of English understanding systems (interfaces) that soo- ner or later one has to re-use, adapting and conve~ ting them to other natural languages. This is not an easy task and in many cases the arisen problems are quite complex. In this paper an experiment …...

The knowledge structures implemented in UC, the UNLX Consultant are sufficient for UC to reply to a large range of user queries in the domain of the UNIX operating sys- tem. This paper describes how these knowledge struc- tures are used in the natural language tasks of parsing, reference, planning, …...

This paper describes the NLMenu System, a menu-based natural language understanding system. Rather than requiring the user to type his input to the system, input to NLMenu is made by selec- ting items from a set of dynamically changing menus. Active menus and items are determined by a predictive left-corner …...

By exploring the relationship between parsing and deduction, a new and more general view of chart parsing is obtained, which encompasses parsing for grammar formalisms based on unification, and is the basis of the Earley Deduction proof procedure for definite clauses. The efficiency of this approach for an interesting class …...

A central goal of linguistic theory is to explain why natural languages are the way they are. It has often been supposed that com0utational considerations ought to play a role in this characterization, but rigorous arguments along these lines have been difficult to come by. In this paper we show …...

Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025 Native speakers of English show definite and consistent preferences for certain readings of syntactically ambiguous sen- tences. A user of a natural-language-processing system would naturally expect it to reflect the same preferences. Thus, such systems must model in …...

The partially free word order in German belongs to the class of phenomena in natttral language that require a close in- teraction between syntax and pragmatics. Several competing principles, which are based on syntactic and on discourse in- formation, determine the [ineac order of noun phrases. A solu- tion to …...

Traditionally, translation from the parse tree repre- senting a sentence to a semantic representation (such as frames or procedural semantics) has a/ways been the most ad hoc part of natural language understand- •ng (NLU) systems. However, recent advances in lin- guistics, most notably the system of formal semantics known as …...

We examine several behaviors for query systems that become possible with the ability to represent and reason about change in data bases: queries about possible futures, queries about alternative histories, and offers of monitors as responses to queries. A modal temporal logic is developed for this purpose. A completion axiom …...

Metagrammaticai formalisms that combine context-free phrase structure rules and metarules (MPS grammars) allow con- cise statement of generalizations about the syntax of natural lan- guages. Unconstrained MPS grammars, tmfortunately, are not cornputationally "safe." We evaluate several proposals for con- straining them, basing our amae~ment on computational trac- tability and explanatory …...

An attempt is made to prepare Computational Linguistics for Situation Semantics. I...

An extension to the GPSG grammatical formalism is proposed, allowing non-terminals to consist of finite sequences of category labels, and allowing schematic variables to range over such sequences. The extension is shown to be sufficient to provide a strongly adequate grammar for crossed serial dependencies, as found in e.g. Dutch …...

Context-free grammars, far from having insufficient expressive power for the description of human fan K - uages, may he overly powerful, along three dimen- sions; (i) weak generative capacity: there exists an interesting proper subset of the CFL's, the profligate CFL's, within which no human language appears to fall; (2) …...

Planning provides the basis for a theory of language generation that considers the communicative goals of the speaker when producing utterances. One central problem in designing a system based on such a theory is specifying the requisite linguistic knowledge in a form that interfaces well with a planning system and …...

Computer synthesized speech is and will con- tinue to be an important feature of many artifi- cially intelligent systems. Although current computer synthesized speech is intelligible, it cannot yet pass a Turing test. One avenue for improving the intelligibility of computer synthe- sized speech and for making it more human-like …...

II CURRENT TECHNOLOGY The speech interface is the natural one for the human user and is beginning to be used in a limited way in many applications. Some of these applications are experimental; still others have achieved the status of cost-effective utility. A brief summary of the current state-of-the-art of …...

This paper discusses the linguistic and computational techniques employed in the current version of Machine Translation system being developed at the Linguistics Research Center of the University of Texas, under contract to Siemens AG in Munich, West Germany. We pay particular attention to the reasons for our choice of certain …...

This paper describes the REGIS extended co~nd language, a relational data fan&c/age that allows users to name and describe database objects using natural language phrases. REGIS accepts multlple-word phrases as the names of tables and columns (unlike most systems, which restrict these names to a few characters). An extended command …...