Towards Understanding Natural Language: Semantic Parsing, Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition and Applications

There are various aspects of making computers understand natural language. Semantic parsing and reasoning on commonsense knowledge are the two important ones. Many NLU tasks such as question answering and co-reference resolution require semantic parsing of text and reasoning with different kinds of commonsense knowledge. In this work we present our progress towards these milestones of NLU. We demonstrate the steps we took towards the goal and the tools/techniques we developed, such as a semantic parser and a novel algorithm to automatically acquire commonsense knowledge from text. We also show the usefulness of the developed tools by applying them to solve tasks such as hard coreference resolution. This is an ongoing research and in this paper we present our current progress and the future plans to reach the goal of developing a fully autonomous natural language understanding framework.