Semantic Grammar: A Technique for Constructing Natural Language Interfaces to Instructional Systems.

摘要

One of the major stumbling blocks to the more effective educational use of computers is the lack of a natural means of communication between the student and the computer. This report addresses the problems of developing a system that can understand natural language (English) for advanced computer-based instructional systems. Training environments impose the following requirements on a natural language understanding system: (1) efficiency, (2) habitability, (3) self-teachability, and (4) awareness of ambiguity. The notion of semantic grammar is introduced as a paradigm for organizing the knowledge required to understand language which permits efficient parsing. In semantic grammar, non-terminal categories are formed on conceptual rather than syntactic bases. This allows semantic knowledge to be integrated into the parsing process whenever it is beneficial. The semantic grammar also lends itself to a simple yet powerful method of handling pronominalizations, ellipses and other sentence fragments that arise naturally in a dialogue situation.