Semantic Interpretation of a Japanese Complex Sentence in an Advisory Dialogue

We are developing a spoken dialogue system that helps a computer user perform his tasks through question-answering. In this paper, we propose a method for semantic interpretation of a complex sentence connected by a conjunction, \KEDO." \KEDO" is a postpositional word, and forms an adverbial clause. First, complex sentences containing \KEDO" are extracted from an advisory dialogue database and the semantic role of \KEDO" in each sentence is analyzed. Next, each sentence is decomposed into the part before \KEDO" and the part after \KEDO," and each part is expressed in a semantic structure we developed. Finally, the relationship between the semantic structures and the semantic roles is formalized into rules for semantic interpretation. Our method interprets a complex sentence semantically by applying the rules to the two semantic structures generated from the sentence. As a result, the semantic structures are modi ed or transformed into another if necessary.