Natural language interfaces using limited semantic information
Ralph Grishman, Lynette Hirschman, Carol Friedman · 1982
In order to analyze their input properly, natural language interfaces require access to domain-specific semantic information. However, design considerations for practical systems -- in particular, the desire to construct interfaces which are readily portable to new domains -- require us to limit and segregate this domain-specific information. We consider here the possibility of limiting ourselves to a characterization of the structure of information in a domain. This structure is captured in a domain information schema, which specifies the semantic classes of the domain, the words and phrases which belong to these classes, and the predicate-argument relationships among members of these classes which are meaningful in the domain. We describe how this schema is used by the various stages of two large natural language processing systems.