A conceptual dependency parser for natural language
Roger C. Schank, Larry Tesler · 1969
This paper describes an operable automatic parser for natural language. The parser is not concerned with producing the syntactic structure of an input sentence. Instead, it is a conceptual parser, concerned with determining the underlying meaning of the input. Given a natural language input, the parser identifies and disambiguates the concepts derivable from that input and places them into a network that explicates their inter-relations with respect to the unambiguous meaning of the input.The parser utilizes a conceptually-oriented dependency grammar that has as its highest level the network which represents the underlying conceptual structure of a linguistic input. The parser also incorporates a language-free semantics that checks all possible conceptual dependencies with its own knowledge of the world.The parser is capable of learning new words and new constructions. It presently has a vocabulary of a few hundred words which enables it to operate in a psychiatric interviewing program without placing any restriction on the linguistic input.The theory behind the conceptual dependency is outlined in this paper and the parsing algorithm is explained in some detail.