Frederking R.E. Integrated Natural Language Dialogue. A Computational Model

Kluwer, 1988. — 196 p.Natural language dialogue is a continuous, unified phenomenon Speakers their conversational context to simplify individual utterances through a of linguistic devices, including ellipsis and definite references. Yet most computational systems for using natural language treat individual as separate entities, and have distinctly separate processes for ellipsis, definite references, and other dialogue phenomena
This book, a slightly revised version of the PhD dissertation that I completed in December 1986, describes a different approach It presents a computational system, Psli3, that uses the uniform framework of a production system architecture to carry out natural language understanding and generation in a well-integrated way This is demonstrated primarily through intersentential ellipsis resolution, in addition to examples of definite reference resolution and inter active error correction The system's conversational context arises naturally as the result of the persistence of the internal representations of previous utterances in working memory Natural language input is interpreted within this framework using a modification of the syntactic technique of chart parsing, extended to include semantics, and adapted to the production system architecture This technique, called semantic chart parsing, provides a graceful way of handling ambiguity within this architecture, and allows separate knowledge sources to interact smoothly across different utterances in a highly integrated fashion.
The design of this system demonstrates how flexible and natural user interactions can be carried out using a system with a naturally flexible control structure. In addition, a processing-based taxonomy for ellipsis resolution that we developed is used to analyze our coverage of intersentential ellipsis. The semantic chart parser is further extended to allow several closely related sentences to be treated in a single chart. This allows the relationship between the sentences to be used in a simple way to select between competing alternate interpretations, and provides a natural means of resolving complex elliptical utterances.
The resulting system is described in detail, and extensive examples of the system's processing of user interactions are presented The major advantage of this book over the dissertation is the presence of an index, which frees the reader from having to memorize the whole work in order to find something again laterRelevant Previous Work
An Analysis of Natural Language Dialogue
The Implementation
The Program in Action