Accessing Knowledge through Natural Language

Publisher Summary The ability to incorporate knowledge is a major source of difficulty confronting the designer of the ideal natural language system. This chapter focuses on the concerns which must be confronted in the design of a sophisticated natural language system. These concerns fall into six main categories: enhancing linguistic coverage, creating flexible parsing strategies, integrating knowledge and language, devising comprehensive knowledge representation schemes, modeling the user, and recognizing the need to handle various discourse phenomena. These concerns are explored showing how, over the years, systems have evolved more and more elaborate parsing strategies which are also flexible and general. The chapter discusses the necessity of incorporating knowledge of the domain, knowledge of the user, knowledge of the discourse structure into the natural language system, and many research efforts currently under way investigating problems deriving from this necessity. Issues that arise when trying to represent these diverse kinds of knowledge are explained. The natural language parts of the system must emulate principles of good communication between humans; the information accessed must often go beyond mere facts into the realm of knowledge. The ideal natural language interface may not be available for some time, but as we move into the future, closer and closer approximations to it should be.