Research and technology 1995 annual report

As the NASA Center responsible for assembly, checkout, servicing, launch, recovery, and operational support of Space Transportation System elements and payloads, the John F. Kennedy Space Center is placing increasing emphasis on its advanced technology development program. This program encompasses the efforts of the Engineering Development Directorate laboratories, most of the KSC operations contractors, academia, and selected commercial industries - all working in a team effort within their own areas of expertise. This edition of the Kennedy Space Center Research and Technology 1995 Annual Report covers efforts of all these contributors to the KSC advanced technology development program, as well as technology transfer activities. Major areas of research include environmental engineering, automation, robotics, advanced software, materials science, life sciences, mechanical engineering, nondestructive evaluation, and industrial engineering

Why Base The Knowledge Representation Language On Natural Language?

It is argued that a knowledge representation language intended to be applied across diverse domains must be based on natural language (NL). It is also indicated that such a representation language will facilitate the acquisition of knowledge from NL and from the interaction with other programs in need of obtaining some knowledge. The main aspects of a knowledge representation language that is based on these ideas are presented, and the results of such a language in its application to the task of acquiring knowledge from encyclopedic texts are briefly discussed

Automatic Acquisition Of Biographic Knowledge From Encyclopedic Texts

Automatically acquiring knowledge from encyclopedic texts, specifically the biographies of famous people found in the World Book Encyclopedia, begins with an electronic version of the text of a biography and ends with knowledge structures representing the knowledge that has been acquired. This acquisition process is performed without human assistance of any kind and thus involves not only issues in the area of knowledge acquisition, but also issues in natural language understanding and knowledge representation. We describe one problem from each of these two areas: interpretation of deverbal nominalizations and representation of the a priori knowledge required by the semantic interpreter. The results of two comprehensive experiments are presented in this article, which show that these problems can be solved on the way to near human performance in answering a large set of questions. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Automatic acquisition of biographic knowledge from encyclopedic texts

Automatically acquiring knowledge from encyclopedic texts, specifically the biographies of famous people found in the World Book Encyclopedia, begins with an electronic version of the text of a biography and ends with knowledge structures representing the knowledge that has been acquired. This acquisition process is performed without human assistance of any kind and thus involves not only issues in the area of knowledge acquisition, but also issues in natural language understanding and knowledge representation. We describe one problem from each of these two areas: interpretation of deverbal nominalizations and representation of the a priori knowledge required by the semantic interpreter. The results of two comprehensive experiments are presented in this article, which show that these problems can be solved on the way to near human performance in answering a large set of questions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved