The Delphi Natural Language Understanding System

Abstract

This paper presents Delphi, the natural language component of the BBN Spoken Language System. Delphi is a domain- independent natural language question answering system that is solidly based on linguistic principles, yet which is also robust to ungrammatical input. It includes a domain-independent, broad-coverage grammar of English. Analysis components include an agenda-based best-first parser and a fallback component for partial understanding that works by fragment combination. Delphi has been formally evaluated in the ARPA Spoken Language program's ATIS (Airline Travel Information System) domain, and has performed well. Delphi has also been ported to a spoken language demonstration system in an Air Force Resource Management domain. We discuss results of the evaluation as well as the porting process.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA457479

Entities

People

  • David Stallard
  • Madeleine Batges
  • Robert Bobrow
  • Robert Ingria

Organizations

  • BBN Technologies

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Applied Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Computing
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Grammars
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Natural Languages
  • Translations

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).