NL Understanding with a Grammar of Constructions
Wlodek Zadrozny, Marcin Szummer, Stanislaw Jarecki, David
E. Johnson, Leora Morgenstern
Proc. Coling '94
Tokyo, Japan
We present an approach to natural language understanding based on a
computable grammar of constructions. A "construction" consists of a
set of features of form and a description of meaning in a context. A
grammar is a set of constructions. This kind of grammar is the key
element of Mincal, an implemented natural language, speech-enabled
interface to an on-line calendar system. The system consists of a NL
grammar, a parser, an on-line calendar, a domain knowledge base (about
dates, times and meetings), an application knowledge base (about the
calendar), a speech recognizer, a speech generator, and the interfaces
between those modules. We claim that this architecture should work in
general for spoken interfaces in small domains. In this paper we
present two novel aspects of the architecture: (a) the use of
constructions, integrating descriptions of form, meaning and context
into one whole; and (b) the separation of domain knowledge from
application knowledge. We describe the data structures for encoding
constructions, the structure of the knowledge bases, and the
interactions of the key modules of the system.
Paper available in compressed Postscript (5 pages, 37 Kb)
Martin
Szummer, szummer@media.mit.edu.NOSPAM(remove
the .NOSPAM before sending)