Out of the Laboratory: A Case Study with the IRUS Natural Language Interface.

摘要

DARPA's Strategic Computing Program in the application area of Navy Battle Management has provided us several challenges and opportunities in natural language processing research and development. At the beginning of the effort, a set of domain-independent software components, developed through fundamental research efforts dating back as much as seven years, existed. The IRUS software 1) consists of two subsystems: one for linguistic processing and one for adding specifics of the back end. The first subsystem is linguistic in nature, while the second subsystem is not. Linguistic processing includes morphological, syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis to generate a formula in logic corresponding to the meaning of an English input. The linguistic subsystem is application-independent and also independent of data base interfaces. (This is achieved by factoring all application specifics into the back end processor or into knowledge bases such as dictionary entries and case frame rules, that are domain-specific.) The non-linguistic components convert the logical form to the code necessary for a given underlying system, such as a relational data base.