Towards Knowledge Acquisition from Natural Language Documents-- Automatic Model Construction from Hardware Manual--

In this paper, we explore automatic model construction by analyzing natural language documents. The extracted model will be utilized by a CAD system. A system called hmU, in the course of development, is designed to allow knowledge on very complex hardware module like LSI or VLSI to be incorporated into its knowledge base. The acquired knowledge will be utilized for helping human designer understand the component from various levels of abstraction. The focus of this paper is attentioned more to issues on knowledge representation and model inference than that on natural language analysis. Hierarchical model is employed. In particular, cause-effect representation is used to make it clear how actions of each module and events are related to each other. A brief description is given to illustrate our approach. 1