Domain-Independent Task Specification In The Tacitus Natural Language System

Abstract

Many seemingly very different application tasks for natural language systems can be viewed as a matter of inferring the instance of a prespecified schema from the information in the text and the knowledge base. We have defined and implemented a schema specification and recognition language for the TACITUS natural language system. This effort entailed adding operators sensitive to resource bounds to the first-order predicate calculus accepted by a theorem-prover. We give examples of the use of this schema language in a diagnostic task, an application involving data base entry from messages, and a script recognition task, and we consider further possible developments.