The Semantic Component of PAL: The Personal Assistant Language Understanding Program

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defence under Office of Naval Research Contract N00014-75-C-0643.This paper summarizes the design and implementation of the "semantics" module of a natural language undertanding system for the personal assistant domain. This module includes mappings to deep frames, noun phrase referencing and discourse analysis.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Presupposition in Lexical Analysis and Discourse

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-70-A-0362-0003.Recent research in linguistic analysis of presuppositions has provided numerous indications of the role of presupposition in lexical analysis. Still others have argued there is no distinction between meaning and the presupposition of a word. In this paper I discuss both issues of what presuppositions are related to lexical analysis and what happens to these presupposition in discourse. Finally, I comment on how this knowledge could be made available to a natural language understanding program.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Levels of Complexity in Discourse for Reference Disambiguation and Speech Act Interpretation

This paper presents a discussion of means of describing the discourse and its components which makes speech act interpretation and reference disambiguation possible with minimal search of the knowledge in the database. A portion of this paper will consider how a frames representation of sentences and common sense knowledge provides a mechanism for representing the postulated discourse components. Finally some discussion of the use of the discourse model and of frames in a discourse understanding program for a personal assistant will be presented