A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF VERBAL UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

This paper presents a theory of verbal understanding based on a formal model of conceptual structures that represent verbal meanings expressed in English sentences. Verbal understanding is defined as the capability for disambiguation, paraphrase, question answering, translation, etc., with regard to natural language sentences. The model has been implemented as Protosynthex 3 in LISP on the Q-32 time-shared system. Experimental results from the system include examples of the analysis of complex sentences, disambiguation of multisensed words via sentence context, question answering via logical inference, and meaning-preserving paraphrase generation. The authors conclude that sophisticated natural language processing by computers is a realistic goal that has been partly achieved.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 30, 1968
Accession Number
AD0672782

Entities

People

  • John F. Burger
  • Robert F. Simmons
  • Robert M. Schwarcz

Organizations

  • System Development Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Birds
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Simulations
  • Computers
  • Corporations
  • Databases
  • Dictionaries
  • Formal Languages
  • Grammars
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Languages
  • New York

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation