Model-Based Analysis of Messages about Equipment

摘要

Considerable progress has been made in developing systems which understand short passages of technical text. Several prototypes have been developed, for such domains as patient medical records, equipment failure reports, and intelligence messages. Except for very narrow domains such as weather reports, however, none of these systems seem to be robust enough for operational use. Typical success rates - where any are reported - are in the range of 70 to 80% of sentences correctly analyzed; substantially better rates are very hard to obtain, even with careful system tuning. The objective in developing PROTEUS (the PROtotype TExt Understanding System) is to see if this rate can be substantially improved for a domain of moderate complexity. In order to achieve this improvement, we must bring to bear on the language analysis task the various syntatic, semantic, and discourse constraints, along with a fairly detailed knowledge of the domain of discourse. The system is initially being applied to equipment failure reports (CASEPs) for selected equipment on board Navy ships (initially, the equipment in the starting air system). In this case, the domain knowledge is the knowledge of the structure and function of these pieces of equipment. This Paper presents an overview of the PROTEUS system. It then focuses on the domain information: how it is represented, how it is integrated with the language processing, and how it serves to resolve ambiguities in the input text.