Mapping of Linguistic Structures into Computer-Interpretable Form.

Abstract

The report concerns the mapping of linguistically motivated underlying structures of English sentences into computer-interpretable code. To this end, use is made of a large transformational grammar which specifies a subset of English, the purpose of which is to serve as the input language for an experimental question answering system. A modified version of a translation mechanism due to Knuth is proposed to effect the required mapping, and five specific translators based upon that mechanism are presented and discussed. The last of these translators gives output that can be executed by the LISP System interpreter if certain necessary LISP functions have been defined and appropriate data base information has been stored. One of those LISP functions (the SET function), which is used to express the translation of noun phrases, is given special attention directed toward achieving efficient data base item retrieval and the elimination of unnecessary computation. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1972
Accession Number
AD0757896

Entities

People

  • Stanley R. Petrick

Organizations

  • IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Computations
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Elimination
  • Grammars
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Transformational Grammars
  • Translations
  • Translators

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics