An Integrated Robust Parsing using Multiple Knowledge Sources

Abstract

Natural language communication with computers has been a major goal of artificial intelligence (AI). Database systems and expert systems require a flexible interface that allows users to communicate through natural language such as Japanese and English, if users are not able to communicate with the systems in artificial command languages. In order to satisfy this requirement, many natural language processing (NLP) systems have been proposed, but most of them assume that all input sentences from users are grammatically correct. However, when users communicate with the NLP system, they may put grammatically ill-formed sentences, especially in spoken language interfaces. For example, users often omit some words, change word order, or make some careless errors such as agreement errors, spelling errors, and adding of extra words. To use NLP systems in practical applications, we need to construct an NLP system having a capability of handling not only grammatically well-formed sentences but a..