The State-of-the-Art in Natural Language Understanding.

Abstract : Research in computer understanding of natural language has led to the construction of programs which can handle a number of different types of language, including questions about the contents of data bases, stories and news articles, dialogues, and scene descriptions. This research draws on and has in turn had an effect on many other research areas, including software engineering, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and knowledge representation. This paper provides a brief history and overview of the field, along with examples and explanations of the operation of several natural language understanding programs. The limitations of our current technology are discussed, and assessments are given of the most promising current research directions. (Author)