Parsing in Dialogue Systems using Typed Feature Structures

The analysis of natural language in the context of keyboard-driven dialogue systems is the central issue addressed in this paper. A module that corrects typing errors and performs domain-specifc morphological analysis has been developed. A parser for typed unification grammars is designed and implemented in C++; for description of the lexicon and the grammer a specialised specification language has been developed. It is argued that typed unification grammars and especially the newly developed specification language are convenient formalisms for describing natural language use in dialogue systems. Research on these issues is carried out in the context of the Schisma project, a research project of the Parlevink group in linguistic engineering; participants in Schisma are KPN Research and the University of Twente. The aims of the Schisma project are twofold: both the accumulation of knowledge in the field of computational linguistics and the development of a natural language interfaced theatre information and booking system is envisaged. The Schisma project serves as a testbed for the development of the various language analysis modules necessary for dialogue systems

Towards Probabilistic Unification-Based Parsing

This thesis is about natural language parsing with corpus-based grammars that are enriched with statistics. Parsing is the process of analysing the syntactic structure of an utterance. The role of statistics is to improve the parsing process. Our research is done in the context of the SCHISMA project, in which a natural language dialogue system for theatre information and booking services is developed

Supporting Viewpoint-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

Increasingly, organisations establish what is called an enterprise architecture. The enterprise architecture combines and relates all architectures describing some aspect of the organization, such as the business process architecture, the information architecture, and the application architecture. It is a blueprint of the organisation, which serves as a starting point for analysis, design and decision making. Viewpoints define abstractions on the set of models representing the enterprise architecture, each aimed at a particular type of stakeholder and addressing a particular set of concerns. The use of viewpoints is widely advocated for managing the inherent complexity in enterprise architecture. Viewpoints can both be used to view certain aspects in isolation, and for relating two or more aspects. However, in order to make such a viewpoint-oriented approach practically feasible, architects require a tool environment, which supports the definition, generation, editing and management of architectural views. Moreover, such an environment should work in concert with existing domain-specific modelling tools. In this paper, we present the design of such a tool environment for viewpoint-oriented enterprise architecture

Language Analysis In Schisma

Introduction schisma is a research project that is concerned with the development of a natural language accessible theatre information and booking system. In this project two research approaches can be distinguished. One approach is devoted to theoretical research in the areas syntax, semantics and pragmatics.Research on syntax has been conducted on a unifying parsing approach [7], left and head corner grammars [6], on stochastic context-free grammars [1] and on unification grammar parsing [2][4]. Research on semantics and pragmatics has been conducted on dialogue act classification [3] and from a logical point of view [5]. The other approach is more practically oriented in that it is more focused on the realisation of a fully functional prototype of the SCHISMA system. To this purpose, in the past, the interface development system Natural Language tm has been used for implementing a schisma prototype, a Wizard of Oz e