A Transformational Approach to NL Understanding in Dialogue Systems
Danny Lie, Jan H. Hulstijn, H.J.A. op den Akker, Anton Nijholt · University of Twente Research Information · 1998
Natural language understanding in dialogue systems is taken to consist of two subsequent processes: rewrite and understand. The rewriting proces is a transformational proces in which natural language utterances are mapped via a sequence of context-sensitive string to string transformations onto some semantic normal form. In the understand proces an interpretation of the semantic form is made, with respect to a particular dialogue state. The rewrite proces is completely independent of the state of the dialogue. The transformational approach presented is compared with more traditional grammatical and parsing approaches. The approach is used in a first prototype of a natural language interface for a theatre information and booking system.