The FLEX system

Abstract

This report describes the Description Logic (DL) system FLEX. It consists of a brief overview over the field of Description Logics in general and the characteristics of FLEX, a tutorial for the FLEX system, a brief description of the inference algorithms, and an appendix containing a syntax overview, the formal semantics, a reference manual, and an installation guide. In a sense, the FLEX system can be seen as a extension of the DL system BACK. The main differences are that FLEX supports full disjunction and negation, weighted defaults, situated object descriptions, term-valued features, and flexible inference strategies. On the other hand, FLEX does not support some of the functionality provided by the BACK system, such as revision, for example. The FLEX system is developed in the project KIT-VM11, which is part of the VERBMOBIL project, a project concerned with face-to-face dialogue interpreting funded by the German Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology. Our main criteria for designing the FLEX system are therefore based on requirements arising from the application of semantic disambiguation in Machine Translation. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RO 11(124) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman