MEYERS.UCI-20A%Rand-Relay@sri-unix.UUCP (12/09/83)
Over a month ago, I announced that I'd be submitting
a paper on phrasal analysis to COLING. I apologize
to all those who asked for a copy for not getting it
to them yet. COLING acceptance date is April 2,
so this may be the earliest date at which I'll be releasing
papers. Please do not lose heart!
Some preview of the material might interest AILIST readers:
The paper is entitled "Conceptual Grammar", and discusses
a grammar that uses syntactic and 'semantic' nonterminals.
Very specific and very general information about language
can be represented in the grammar rules. The grammar is
organized into explicit levels of abstraction.
The emphasis of the work is pragmatic, but I believe it
represents a new and useful approach to Linguistics as
well.
Conceptual Grammar can be viewed as a systematization of the
knowledge base of systems such as PHRAN (Wilensky and Arens,
at UC Berkeley). Another motivation for a conceptual grammar is
the lack of progress in language understanding using syntax-based
approaches. A third motivation is the lack of intuitive appeal
of existing grammars -- existing grammars offer no help in manipulating
concepts the way humans might. Conceptual Grammar is
an 'open' grammar at all levels of abstraction. It is meant
to handle special cases, exceptions to general rules, idioms, etc.
Papers on the implemented system, called VOX, will follow
in the near future. VOX analyzes messages in the Navy domain.
(However, the approach to English is completely general).
If anyone is interested, I can elaborate, though it is
hard to discuss such work in this forum. Requests
for papers (and for abstracts of UCI AI Project papers)
can be sent by computer mail, or 'snail-mail' to:
Amnon Meyers
AI Project
Department of Computer Science
University of California
Irvine, CA 92717
PS: A paper has already been sent to CSCSI. The papers emphasize
different aspects of Conceptual Grammar. A paper on VOX as
an implementation of Conceptual Grammar is planned for AAAI.