Some Issues in Parsing and Natural Language Understanding

Our response to the questions posed to this panel is influenced by a number of beliefs (or biasesl) which we h a v e d e v e l o p e d i n t h e c o u r s e o f b u i l d i n g and a n a l y z i n ~ the operation of several natural language understanding (NLU) systems. [I, 2, 3, 12] While the emphasis of the panel i~ on parslnK, we feel that the recovery of the syntactic structure of a natural lan~unKe utterance must be viewed as part of a larger process of reeoverlnK the meaning, intentions and goals underlying its generation. Hence it is inappropriate to consider designing or evaluatln~ natural language parsers or Erem,~ra without taking into account the architecture of the whole ~LU system of which they're a part. I This is the premise from which Our beliefs arise, beliefs which concern two thinks: