The Defense Documentation Center Natural English Preprocessor

Abstract

The report describes the results of a one-year project to develop a prototype system for translating natural English requests into a formal Boolean request language to give the Defense Documentation Center a look at the current state of the art in natural language processing as it would apply to the use of natural English queries in the DDC on-line environment. The system makes use of a transition network parser to perform a detailed syntactic analysis of the input sentences, and uses a general purpose semantic interpretation procedure to construct a Boolean combination of key phrases for use as a search strategy by the DDC retrieval system. The performance of this system on two samples of 200 and 100 sentences respectively is described, and the major problems which must be solved before a practical production system could be implemented are discussed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 31, 1971
Accession Number
AD0727992

Entities

People

  • W. A. Woods

Organizations

  • BBN Technologies

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • English Language
  • Environment
  • Grammars
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Systems
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Lisp Programming Language
  • Nanogenerators
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • United States

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

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