Knowledge-Based Natural Language Understanding: A AAAI-87 Survey Talk

Abstract

This overview is organized within a historical framework, although time limitations have forced me to invent a version of history that is necessarily incomplete. The title of the talk was given to me by the AAAI program Committee, who wisely restricted the scope of my task by including the descriptor knowledge-based. This mercifully allowed me to ignore a large body of work that focuses exclusively on the syntactic structures of natural language. Even so, the body of work that can accurately be described as knowledge-based natural language understanding is large, and difficult to cover in the space of one hour. To maintain continuity, I utilized the recurring theme of weak methods vs. strong methods. This foundational theme helped me pare down my view of history and serves as my only defense against otherwise unforgivable omissions in the overview. Even so, it was difficult to pick and choose from the corpus of potentially relevant research, and the usual disclaimers about intelligible brevity at the cost of comprehensive coverage must be piously invoked to ward off inevitable accusations of ignorance, prejudice, and other sins associated with warped thinking.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1991
Accession Number
ADA249120

Entities

People

  • Wendy G. Lehnert

Organizations

  • University of Massachusetts Amherst

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Biological Sciences
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Grammars
  • Information Processing
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Natural Languages
  • New York
  • Psychology

Readers

  • Academic Conference Management
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Educational Psychology

Technology Areas

  • Space