Natural language, knowledge representation, and discourse
James F. Allen, Lenhart K. Schubert · 1990
The principal objective of this project is to develop a system for representing and reasoning about the discourse context in extended man-machine dialogs. Current focus areas include the development of a general theory of multi-agent planning to account for the structure of natural-language dialog, the development of a general knowledge representation for capturing a wide range of natural language semantics, and the development of a general, error- tolerant parser and semantic interpreter for English that can be guided by discourse information. Specifically, we are developing a model of discourse plans that includes actions such as introducing a new topic, as well as the actions of clarifying, correcting or acknowledging parts of the previous dialog. We are exploring how far the planning approach can be extended, and how the traditional language components, i.e. parsing, semantic interpretation and discourse processing, relate to the planning component.