TACITUS: A Message Understanding System

TACITUS is a general and domain-independent natural language processing system, used so far primarily for message processing. It performs a syntactic analysis of the sentences in the text, producing a logical form. Next, inferential pragmatics processing is applied to the logical form to solve problems of schema recognition, reference resolution, metonymy resolution, and the interpretation of vague predicates. An analysis component then produces the desired output for the application. TACITUS has been applied to several quite different domains, including naval equipment failure reports, naval operations reports, and terrorist reports.