Language Model and Sentence Structure Manipulations for Natural Language Application Systems

I / / / l / / l / / / / / l l Language Model and Sentence Structure Manipulations for Natural Language Application Systems Zenshiro Kawasaki, Keiji Takida, and Masato Tajima Department of Intellectual Information Systems Toyama University 3190 Gofuku, Toyama 930-0887, Japan {kawasaki, zakida, and Zajima}@ecs.Zoyama-u. ac. jp Abstract This paper presents a language model and its application to sentence structure manip- ulations for various natural language ap- plications including human-computer com- munications. Building a working natural language dialog systems requires the inte- gration of solutions to many of the impor- tant subproblems of natural language pro- cessing. In order to materialize any of these subproblems, handling of natural language expressions plays a central role; natural language manipulation facilities axe indis- pensable for any natural language dialog systems. Concept Compound Manipula- tion Language (CCML) proposed in this paper is intended to provide a practical means to manipulate sentences by means of formal uniform operations. 1 Introduction Sentence structure manipulation facilities such as transformation, substitution, translation, etc., axe indispensable for developing and maintaining natu- ral language application systems in which language structure operation plays an essential role. For this reason structural manipulability is one of the most important factors to be considered for designing a sentence structure representation scheme, i.e., a lan- guage model. The situation can be compared to database management systems; each system is based on a specific data model, and a data manipulation sublanguage designed for the data model is provided to handle the data structure (Date, 1990). In Concept Coupling Model (CCM) proposed in this paper, the primitive building block is a Con- cept Frame (CF), which is defined for each phrasal or sentential conceptual unit. The sentence analysis is carried out as a CF instantiation process, in which several CFs axe combined to form a Concept Com- pound (CC), a nested relational structure in which the syntactic and semantic properties of the sen- tence are encoded. The simplicity and uniformity of the CC representation format lead to a correspond- ing simplicity and uniformity in the CC structure operation scheme, i.e., CC Manipulation Language (CCML). Another advantage of the CCM formalism is that it allows inferential facilities to provide flexible hu- man computer interactions for various natural lan- guage applications. For this purpose conceptual re- lationships including synonymous and implicational relations established among CFs are employed. Such knowledge-based operations axe under development and will not be discussed in this paper. In Section 2 we present the basic components of CCM, i.e,, the concept frame and the concept com- pound. Section 3 introduces the CC manipulation language; the major features of each manipulation statement are explained with illustrative examples. Concluding observations axe drawn in Section 4. 2 Concept Coupling Model 2.1 Concept Compound and Concept Frame It is assumed that each linguistic expression such as a sentence or a phrase is mapped onto an ab- stract data structure called a concept compound (CC) which encodes the syntactic and semantic in- formation corresponding to the linguistic …

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