An English language question answering system for a large relational database
Communications of the ACM
Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse
Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse
Script application: computer understanding of newspaper stories.
Script application: computer understanding of newspaper stories.
ACL '80 Proceedings of the 18th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
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This paper presents a simple mechanism for the resolution of anaphora in limited domain natural language systems. For such domains, this mechanism provides functionality equivalent to the natural communication mechanism of anaphora as used and understood by people, but without the deep inferencing or cognitive modelling required for full simulation of human performance. The mechanism covers simple pronoun anaphora, and set selection anaphora (e.g. "last one", "one before", "others"). It was developed to provide the most efficient and effective communication between system and user, even if this meant diverging significantly from human performance when this performance was impractical to reproduce. In cases of radical divergence, we were careful to make the behaviour of the mechanism very simple and easy to predict. In this way, the user can rely either on his experience of human performance or his knowledge of the artificial, but simple, substitute to predict the behaviour of the system m response to his inputs. An algorithmic description of an implemented version of the mechanism is presented. A similar approach to other aspects of man-machine interfaces is recommended as a promising way to address the problem of habitabiiity that still plagues all natural language computer interfaces.