A rule-based approach to ill-formed input
Norman K. Sondheimer, Ralph Weischedel · 1980
Though natural language understanding systems have improved markedly in recent years, they have only begun to consider a major problem of truly natural input: ill-formedness.Quite often natural language input is ill-formed in the sense of being misspelled, ungrammatical, or not entirely meaningful.A requirement for any successful natural language interface must be that the system either intelligently guesses at a user's intent, requests direct clarification, or at the very least, accurately identifies the ill-formedness.This paper presents a proposal for the proper treatment of ill-formed input.Our conjecture is that ill-formedness should be treated as rule-based.Violation of the rules of normal processing should be used to signal ill-formedness.Meta-rules modifying the rules of normal processing should be used for error identification and recovery.These meta-rules correspond to types of errors.Evidence for this conjecture is presented as well as some open ~]estions.