Structured Inheritance Networks and Natural Language Understanding

Abstract

One of the Aost salient difficulties facing the designer of a Natural Language Interface is the appropriate characterization of the seAantics and pragAatics of new doMains. Uhereas various syntactic parsers have been developed which are largely doMain-independent <at least in principle>, the possibility of accoAplishing soMething siAilar in the realM of seMantics and pragMatics has never been convincingly deAonstrated. Focusing on the various episteMological bases for associating attributes with entitits, we exaMint soMe of the rtquireAents that this suggtsts need be Met by a systeA which claiAs to provide a doMain-independent conceptual scheMa core, froM which doAain-specific extensions can be interactively elaborated. In addition to showing how our approach differs froA one which tries to arrive at canonical representations in terAs of invariant seAantic priAitives, we s~etch out ways in which it can be integrated into a general parsing ftechanisM.