Research On Natural-Language Processing At SRI

Abstract

Research on natural-language processing at SRI spans a broad spectrum of activity. Two of our major current efforts are a pair of research projects under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The TEAM project is intended to provide natural-language access to large databases via systems that are easily adaptable to a wide range of new application domains. The KLAUS project is a longer-range effort to address basic research problems in natural-language semantics, commonsense reasoning, and the pragmatics of natural-language communication. These two projects share a common core-language-processing system called DIALOGIC. DIALOGIC also plays an important role in two other projects: research on providing natural-language access to text (funded by the National Library of Medicine), and research on the development of formal grammars (sponsored by National Science Foundation). An additional project of medical applications, MEDINQUIRY (sponsored by the National Cancer Institute), uses a semantic/ pragmatic grammar as the basis for a natural-language interface to medical data. We are also conducting research on natural-language generation (sponsored by the National Science Foundation) and are engaged in two small pilot projects concerned with information management and lexicology.