Translating Declaratively Specified Knowledge and Usage Requirements into a Reconfigurable Machine

This paper is a position paper related to a project at the University of Windsor, Canada, that is concerned with the integration of natural language processing and data base manipulation. The approach that we are investigating is based on Richard Montague’s ideas on natural language interpretation (Montague 1974). Two years ago, we recognized a similarity between the theoretical basis underlying Montague’s ideas and that underlying many of the new “pure” functional programming languages, such as Miranda™ (Turner 1985). We have implemented a system called DMSGII in Miranda capable of answering queries, expressed in English, with respect to a first order database containing facts about the solar system. We believe that we have demonstrated that our approach facilitates the integration of natural language processors, database operations and data, and that the approach provides a useful framework for gaining new insights into the use of semantics in parsing, and the integration of extensional and intensional representations of knowledge.