00100	
00200	
00300			SUMMARY
00400	
00500		Man-machine dialogues using  everday  conversational  English
00600	present   difficult  problems  for  computer  processing  of  natural
00700	language. In constructing a simulation of paranoid thought processes,
00800	we  had  to  design  an  algorithm capable of handling the linguistic
00900	expressions used by interviewers in teletyped diagnostic  psychiatric
01000	interviews.    Our heuristic method involves characterizing the input
01100	expressions by progressively transforming them  into  patterns  which
01200	match,  completely or fuzzily, abstract stored patterns. The power of
01300	this approach lies in its ability to ignore  unrecognized  words  and
01400	still  grasp  the meaning of the message. Grammar-based parsers which
01500	perform a word-by-word, parts-of-speech analysis are too  fragile  to
01600	operate  satisfactorily in real-time interviews allowing unrestricted
01700	English.
01800		Details  of  the  pattern-matching processes are presented in
01900	the paper. The methods utilized  are  general  and  could  serve  any
02000	"host" system which takes natural language input.