Semantic Analysis Based on Linguistic and Ontological Resources

We describe a recently launched project whose objective is to develop an advanced converter of natural language text to semantic structures. The project basically consists in enriching the ETAP-3 linguistic processor, developed by the Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, with a new module – that of semantic analysis. An important feature of this module is that it will use not only linguistic knowledge incorporated in the grammar and the combinatorial dictionary, but also extralinguistic knowledge stored in the ontology and contextual information accumulated in the fact repository. We developed a small ontology that serves as the semantic metalanguage for Semantic Structures. Several examples are given that show how the ontology is used and how the meaning is represented.