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sn#011488 filedate 1972-11-10 generic text, type T, neo UTF8
00100 PROBLEMS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING IN TELETYPED INTERVIEW DIALOGUES.
00150
00200
00300 By `natural language` I shall mean everyday American English
00400 such as is used by readers of this book in ordinary conversations.
00500 It is still difficult to be explicit about the processes which
00600 enable hummans to interpret and respond to natural language.
00700 Philosophers, linguists and psychologists have speculated about
00800 and investigated natural language with various purposes and few
00900 useful results. Now attempts are being made in artificial intelligence to write
01000 algorithims which `understand' what is being expressed in natural
01100 language utterances.
01200 During the 1960's when machine processing of natural language
01300 was dominated by syntactic considerations, it became clear that
01400 this approach was insufficient. The current view is that to unDerstand
01600 what utterances say, knowlede about linguistic syntax and semantics
01700 must be combined with knowledge about an underlying conceptual
01800 structure containing a world-model and an ability to draw inferences.
01900 How to achieve this combination efficiently represents a huge task for
02000 both theory and implementation.
02100 Since the behavior being simulated by our paranoid model is the
02200 linguistic-conceptual behavior of paranoid patients in a psychiatric
02300 interview, the model must have some ability to process and respond to
02400 natural language input in a manner indicating the underlying pathological
02500
02600 to develop a method for understanding everyday Englisg sufficient
02700 for the model to behave conversationally in a paranoid way in a
02800 circumscribed situation. What is said in this situation is far
02900 icher than what is said in conversations with a block-stacking
02950 i2900
03000 robot but its requirements for constructing an interpretation
03100 of an input are not as complex as trying to understand anything
03200 said in English bby anybbody in any dialogue situation.
03300