An Application of Automated Language Understanding Techniques to the Generation of Data Base Elements

This paper defines a methodology for automatically analyzing textual reports of events and synthesizing event data elements from the reports for automated input to a data base. The long-term goal of the work described is to develop a support technology for specific analytical functions related to the evaluation of daily message traffic in a military environment. The approach taken leans heavily on theoretical advances in several disciplines, including linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology. The aim is to model the cognitive activities of the human analyst as he reads and understands message text, distilling its contents into information items of interest to him, and building a conceptual model of the information conveyed by the message. This methodology, although developed on the basis of a restricted subject domain, is presumed to be general, and extensible to other domains.Our approach is centered around the notion of "event", and utilizes two major knowledge sources: (1) a model of the sublanguage for event reporting which characterizes the message traffic, and (2), a model of the analyst-user's conceptualization of the world (i.e., a model of the entities and relations characteristic of his world).