291 research outputs found
A database management capability for Ada
The data requirements of mission critical defense systems have been increasing dramatically. Command and control, intelligence, logistics, and even weapons systems are being required to integrate, process, and share ever increasing volumes of information. To meet this need, systems are now being specified that incorporate data base management subsystems for handling storage and retrieval of information. It is expected that a large number of the next generation of mission critical systems will contain embedded data base management systems. Since the use of Ada has been mandated for most of these systems, it is important to address the issues of providing data base management capabilities that can be closely coupled with Ada. A comprehensive distributed data base management project has been investigated. The key deliverables of this project are three closely related prototype systems implemented in Ada. These three systems are discussed
Selectional Restrictions in HPSG
Selectional restrictions are semantic sortal constraints imposed on the
participants of linguistic constructions to capture contextually-dependent
constraints on interpretation. Despite their limitations, selectional
restrictions have proven very useful in natural language applications, where
they have been used frequently in word sense disambiguation, syntactic
disambiguation, and anaphora resolution. Given their practical value, we
explore two methods to incorporate selectional restrictions in the HPSG theory,
assuming that the reader is familiar with HPSG. The first method employs HPSG's
Background feature and a constraint-satisfaction component pipe-lined after the
parser. The second method uses subsorts of referential indices, and blocks
readings that violate selectional restrictions during parsing. While
theoretically less satisfactory, we have found the second method particularly
useful in the development of practical systems
The Speech-Language Interface in the Spoken Language Translator
The Spoken Language Translator is a prototype for practically useful systems
capable of translating continuous spoken language within restricted domains.
The prototype system translates air travel (ATIS) queries from spoken English
to spoken Swedish and to French. It is constructed, with as few modifications
as possible, from existing pieces of speech and language processing software.
The speech recognizer and language understander are connected by a fairly
conventional pipelined N-best interface. This paper focuses on the ways in
which the language processor makes intelligent use of the sentence hypotheses
delivered by the recognizer. These ways include (1) producing modified
hypotheses to reflect the possible presence of repairs in the uttered word
sequence; (2) fast parsing with a version of the grammar automatically
specialized to the more frequent constructions in the training corpus; and (3)
allowing syntactic and semantic factors to interact with acoustic ones in the
choice of a meaning structure for translation, so that the acoustically
preferred hypothesis is not always selected even if it is within linguistic
coverage.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX. Published: Proceedings of TWLT-8, December 199
An intelligent user interface for browsing satellite data catalogs
A large scale domain-independent spatial data management expert system that serves as a front-end to databases containing spatial data is described. This system is unique for two reasons. First, it uses spatial search techniques to generate a list of all the primary keys that fall within a user's spatial constraints prior to invoking the database management system, thus substantially decreasing the amount of time required to answer a user's query. Second, a domain-independent query expert system uses a domain-specific rule base to preprocess the user's English query, effectively mapping a broad class of queries into a smaller subset that can be handled by a commercial natural language processing system. The methods used by the spatial search module and the query expert system are explained, and the system architecture for the spatial data management expert system is described. The system is applied to data from the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite, and results are given
An Innovative, Multidisciplinary Educational Program in Interactive Information Storage and Retrieval
There exists a large number of large-scale bibliographic Information Storage and Retrieval Systems containing large amounts of valuable data of interest in a wide variety of research applications. These systems are not used to capacity because the end users, i.e., the researchers, have not been trained in the techniques of accessing such systems. This thesis describes the development of a transportable, university-level course in methods of querying on-line interactive Information Storage and Retrieval systems as a solution to this problem. This course was designed to instruct upper division science and engineering students to enable these end users to directly access such systems. The course is designed to be taught by instructors who are not specialists in either computer science or research skills. It is independent of any particular IS and R system or computer hardware. The project is sponsored by NASA and conducted by the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Southern University
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A Survey of Interfaces to Data Base and Expert Systems.
The problem of natural language recognition has been studied by many researchers since the early 1960‘s. In particular, researchers are concerned with building interfaces to existing systems, such as data base and expert systems. Such interfaces focus on easing communications between the underlying systems and the user. In this paper we survey various interfaces to both expert and data base systems. Natural language interfaces to data base systems have been quite successful. In contrast, natural language interfaces for expert systems are still in the initial stages of design. One mode of communication between an expert system and a user is via a menu interface. Such an interface presents many limitations [Datskovsky 84] [Datskovsky 85]. A natural language interface to expert systems that would not only alleviate such limitations, but also be domain independent and easily transportable from one system to another is desirable. By studying natural language interfaces to data base systems as well as existing interfaces to expert systems, we hope to gain insights on requirements for expert system interfaces and existing natural language technology that may help us in building natural language interfaces to ex pen systems
Natural language semantics and compiler technology
This paper recommends an approach to the implementation of semantic representation languages (SRLs) which exploits a parallelism between SRLs and programming languages (PLs). The design requirements of SRLs for natural language are similar to those of PLs in their goals. First, in both cases we seek modules in which both the surface representation (print form) and the underlying data structures are important. This requirement highlights the need for general tools allowing the printing and reading of expressions (data structures). Second, these modules need to cooperate with foreign modules, so that the importance of interface technology (compilation) is paramount; and third, both compilers and semantic modules need "inferential" facilities for transforming (simplifying) complex expressions in order to ease subsequent processing. But the most important parallel is the need in both fields for tools which are useful in combination with a variety of concrete languages -- general purpose parsers, printers, simplifiers (transformation facilities) and compilers. This arises in PL technology from (among other things) the need for experimentation in language design, which is again parallel to the case of SRLs. Using a compiler-based approach, we have implemented NLL, a public domain software package for computational natural language semantics. Several interfaces exist both for grammar modules and for applications, using a variety of interface technologies, including especially compilation. We review here a variety of NLL, applications, focusing on COSMA, an NL interface to a distributed appointment manager
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