Conversion of a French surface expression into its semantic representation according to the RESEDA metalanguage
Jacqueline Léon, Daniel Memmi, Monique Ornato, Joanna Pomian, Gian Piero Zarri · 1982
INTRODUCTION The work that we intend to present here is a preliminary study concerning the automatic translation of natural language statements - which describe the biographies of historical personages taken into account by the BESEDA system - into the RESEDA semantic metalanguage. The RESEDA project itself concerns the creation and practical exploitation of a database containing the biographies of historical personages of the late Middle Ages in France. The most important characteristic of the system'lies in the possibility of using inference procedures to question the database about causal relationships which may exist between the different recorded facts, and which are not explicitly declared at the time of data entry (Zarri 1979, 1981)'. 184 $. LIGON et al. THE RESEDA METALANGUAGE The biographical information which constitutes the system's database is organized in the form of units called "planes". There are several different types of plane ; the "predicative planes", the most