Kavraki Lab

Physical and Biological Computing

Abstract:

The analysis of natural language in the context of
keyboard-driven dialogue systems is the central issue
addressed in this paper. A module that corrects typing
errors and performs domain-specific morphological analysis
has been developed. A parser for typed unification grammars
is designed and implemented in C++; for description of the
lexicon and the grammer a specialised specification
language has been developed. It is argued that typed
unification grammars and especially the newly developed
specification language are convenient formalisms for
describing natural language use in dialogue systems.
Research on these issues is carried out in the context of
the Schisma project, a research project of the Parlevink
group in linguistic engineering; participants in Schisma
are KPN Research and the University of Twente. The aims of
the Schisma project are twofold: both the accumulation of
knowledge in the field of computational linguistics and the
development of a natural language interfaced theatre
information and booking system is envisaged. The Schisma
project serves as a testbed for the development of the
various language analysis modules necessary for dialogue
systems.