TACITUS: Text Understanding for Strategic Computing

Abstract

The aim of the TACITUS project was to elaborate a theory of how knowledge is used in the interpretation of discourse, and to implement this theory in a computer system for understanding naturally generated texts. This research was carried out between May 1985 and September 1990. The principal results of the research were as follows: 1) The development of a theory of inference in discourse interpretation based on weighted abduction. This has yielded a simple and elegant framework in which a broad range on linguistic phenomena can be investigated; 2) The construction of a large knowledge base of commonsense knowledge, particularly for knowledge in the physical domain, with a more preliminary extension to social domains; and 3) The implementation of the TACITUS system for text understanding, a system which has been applied in four different domains. The research done on this project can be classified into six areas--syntax, encoding commonsense knowledge, encoding domain knowledge, local pragmatics, task pragmatics, and knowledge acquisition.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA230607

Entities

People

  • Jerry R. Hobbs

Organizations

  • SRI International

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Psychology
  • Reasoning
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval