On Natural Language Processing and Plan Recognition

Christopher W. Geib, Mark Steedman

The research areas of plan recognition and natural language parsing share many common features and even algorithms. However, the dialog between these two disciplines has not been effective. Specifically, significant recent results in parsing mildly context sensitive grammars have not been leveraged in the state of the art plan recognition systems. This paper will outline the relations between natural language processing(NLP) and plan recognition(PR), argue that each of them can effectively inform the other, and then focus on key recent research results in NLP and argue for their applicability to PR.