Knowledge-Based Natural Language Understanding: A AAAI-87 Survey Talk.

摘要

This overview is organized within a historical framework, although time limitations have forced me to invent a version of history that is necessarily incomplete. The title of the talk was given to me by the AAAI Program Committee, who wisely restricted the scope of my task by including the descriptor knowledge-based. This mercifully allowed me to ignore a large body of work that focuses exclusively on the syntactic structures of natural language. Even so, the body of work that can accurately be described as knowledge-based natural language understanding is large, and difficult to cover in the space of one hour. To maintain continuity, I utilized the recurring theme of weak methods vs. strong methods. This foundational theme helped me pare down my view of history and serves as my only defense against otherwise unforgivable omissions in the overview. Even so, it was difficult to pick and choose from the corpus of potentially relevant research, and the usual disclaimers about intelligible brevity at the cost of comprehensive coverage must be piously invoked to ward off inevitable accusations of ignorance, prejudice, and other sins associated with warped thinking.