A measure of semantic complexity for natural language systems

  • Authors:
  • Shannon Pollard;Alan W. Biermann

  • Affiliations:
  • Duke University, LSRC, Durham, NC;Duke University, LSRC, Durham, NC

  • Venue:
  • NAACL-ANLP-SSCNLPS '00 Proceedings of the 2000 NAACL-ANLP Workshop on Syntactic and semantic complexity in natural language processing systems - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper will describe a way to organize the salient objects, their attributes, and relationships between the objects in a given domain. This organization allows us to assign an information value to each collection, and to the domain as a whole, which corresponds to the number of things to "talk about" in the domain. This number gives a measure of semantic complexity; that is, it will correspond to the number of objects, attributes, and relationships in the domain, but not to the level of syntactic diversity allowed when conveying these meanings.Defining a measure of semantic complexity for a dialog system domain will give an insight towards making a complexity measurement standard. With such a standard, natural language programmers can measure the feasibility of making a natural language interface, compare different language processors' ability to handle more and more complex domains, and quantify the abilities of the current state of the art in natural language processors.