Natural Language, Knowledge Representation and Discourse

Goals The principal objective of this project is to develop a system for representing and reasoning about the discourse context in extended man-machine dialogs. Current focus areas include the development of a general theory of multiagent planning to account for the structure of natural-langnage dialog, the development of a general knowledge representation for capturing a wide range of natura l language semantics, and the development of a general, errortolerant parser and semantic interpreter for English that can be guided by discourse information. Specifically, we are developing a model of discourse plans that includes actions such as introducing a new topic, as well as the actions of clarifying, correcting or acknowledging parts of the previous dialog. We are explonng how far the planning approach can be extended, and how the "traditional" language components, i.e. parsing, semantic interpretation and discourse processing, relate to the planning component.