International Inductive Logic Programming Workshop Inductive Logic

This paper reviews our recent work on applying inductive logic programming to the construction of natural language processing systems. We have developed a system, Chill, that learns a parser from a training corpus of parsed sentences by inducing heuristics that control an initial overly-general shift-reduce parser. Chill learns syntactic parsers as well as ones that translate English database queries directly into exe-cutable logical form. The ATIS corpus of airline information queries was used to test the acquisition of syntactic parsers, and Chill performed competitively with recent statistical methods. English queries to a small database on U.S. geography were used to test the acquisition of a complete natural language interface, and the parser that Chill acquired was more accurate than an existing hand-coded system. The paper also includes a discussion of several issues this work has raised regarding the capabilities and testing of ILP systems as well as a summary of our current research directions.