Language Understanding Research at Paramax

Language Understanding Research at Paramax Debo~h A. Dahl, Carl Weir, Suzanne Liebowitz Taylor, Lewis M. Norton, Marcia C. Linebarger and Mark Lipshutz * Paramax Systems Corporation, a Unisys Company P.O. Box 517 Paoli, PA, 19301 ABSTRACT Language understanding work at Paramax focuses on ap- plying general-purpose language understanding technology to spoken language understanding, text understanding, and document processing, integrating language understanding with speech recognition, knowledge-based information re- trieval and image understanding. 1. INTRODUCTION The basic language understanding technology in the Paramax language understanding architecture has been designed to be both independent of the language input inodality (e.g. spoken input vs. scanned OCR input) as we]] as independent of the end application (e.g. com- mand and control vs. data extraction). This architec- ture is shown in Figure 1. I ............. I I.,e i'lgU o~ Input Language Applioetlo~s Figure 1: Paramax Language Understanding Inputs and Applications 2. SPOKEN LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING The focus of our spoken language understanding work is the development of a domain- and application- indepen- dent dialog processing architecture which can be coupled *This paper was partially supported by DARPA contract N000014-89-C0171, administered by the Office of Naval Research, and by internal funding from Paramax Systems Corporation (for- merly Unisys Defense Systems). with a variety of speech recognizers. Some of our recent achievements include: • a non-monotonic reasoning capability, which will support "what if?" exploratory dialogs • a query paraphrase component to enhance user- friendliness • enhanced reference resolution capabilities to sup- port additional types of context-dependent refer- ences • automated training techniques for semantics Figure 2 illustrates the integration of a speech recog- nizer, language understanding component, and a dialog manager (VFE) into a modular spoken language archi- tecture interacting with the user and the application. A Spoken Language Kernel E N-bo81 output Imm speech recognizer Oisplay Io user Figure 2: Paramax spoken language system architecture more detailed description of this work can be found in [1]. 3. TEXT UNDERSTANDING In text understanding we emphasize an architecture in which a variety of components cooperate to produce 459 an analysis of texts. Not all components may be re- quired for any one particular application - they can be intermixed in various ways to suit each application's needs. This architecture, shown in Figure 3 includes keyword-based information retrieval, for message rout- ing. A knowledge-based information retrieval compo- nent (KBIRD) extracts text information which is ac- cessable without a detailed natural language analysis. If an application requires detailed natural language pro- cessing, a natural language processing system is avail- able. Finally, a database record generator formats the extracted information for database generation. This ap- proach is described in [2]. ~::~::~::~::~!~i:~ ................... ~:~% .................................... ::::::::i:i:i:i::"" "'::i:i " !:::i Mecqlng dettcr~l?ttoms of ~¢eat~ts -::!: ::::: ::::: :. -:: :::::|. ...... ~::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::i~:~:i~::.~i " ................ ~; ~:i~.::::~:::: ~ m m ~ m ~ m m ~ I~!~i~:::::::::. !!!~i~i.':...~....:~iiii!i~i~i~i~ii! ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: :::::::::::::: :: :::::::::: :: :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::: :: ::::::::::.":~i~ii i~i YWORD-BASED INFORMATION R~TR1EVAL iF ..... • .... ,- lii ~ .: .__ ,, ) Figure 3: …

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