The design and development of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA)l system has focused on providing access to agentbased applications through an intelligent, cooperative, distributed, and multimodal agent-based user interfaces.The current multimodal interface supports a mix of spoken language, handwriting and gesture, and is adaptable to the user's preferences, resources and environment.Only the primary user interface agents need run on the local computer, thereby simplifying the task of using a range of applications from a variety of platforms, especiall y low-powered computers such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).An important consideration in the design of the OAA was to facilitate mix-andmatch: to facilitate the reuse of agents in new and unanticipated applications, and to support rapid prototyping by facilitating the replacement of agents by better versions.The utility of the agents and tools developed as part of this ongoing research project has been demonstrated by their use as infrastructure in unrelated projects.

We describe an efficient bottom-up parser that interleaves syntactic and semantic structure building. Two techniques are presented for reducing search by reducing local ambiguity: Limited left context constraints are used to reduce local syntactic ambiguity, and deferred sortal-constraint application is used to reduce local semantic ambiguity. We experimentally evaluate these techniques, and show dramatic reductions in both number of chart edges and total parsing time. The robust processing capabilities of the parser are demonstrated in its use in improving the accuracy of a speech recognizer.

Article Free Access Share on Gemini: a natural language system for spoken-language understanding Authors: John Dowding SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Jean Mark Gawron SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Doug Appelt SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , John Bear SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Lynn Cherny SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Robert Moore SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Douglas Moran SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACL '93: Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting on Association for Computational LinguisticsJune 1993Pages 54–61https://doi.org/10.3115/981574.981582Published:22 June 1993Publication History 43citation1,076DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations43Total Downloads1,076Last 12 Months25Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Publisher SiteeReaderPDF

This paper shows how the integration of natural language with direct manipulation produces a multimodal interface that overcomes limitations of these techniques when used separately. Natural language helps direct manipulation in being able to specify objects and actions by description, while direct manipulation enables users to learn which objects and actions are available in the system. Furthermore, graphical rendering and manipulation of context provides a partial solution to difficult problems of natural language anaphora.

An algorithm for generating the possible quantitier scopings for a sentence, in order of preference, is outlined. The scoping assigned to a quanttrier is determined by its interactions with other quanttriers, toodais, negation, and certain syntacticconstituent boundaries. When a potential scoping is logically equivalent to another, the less preferred one is discarded.

We present an object-oriented architecture for a computer-based, real-time, multimedia conferencing system. This architecture divides the system into five functional areas: a multimedia shared workspace, a user interface, conference management, communications, and an information base. The structure and operation of the first four areas are modeled with object-based concepts that address design requirements identified during the development of a proof-of-concept prototype, that preceded the architecture specification.

Model-theoretic semantics provides a computationally attractive means of representing the semantics of natural language. However, the models used in this formalism are static and are usually infinite. Dynamic models are incomplete models that include only the information needed for an application and to which information can be added. Dynamic models are basically approximations of larger conventional models, but differ is several interesting ways.The difference discussed here is the possibility of inconsistent information being included in the model. If a computation causes the model to expand, the result of that computation may be different than the result of performing that same computation with respect to the newly expanded model (i. e. the result is inconsistent with the information currently in the dynamic model). Mechanisms are introduced to eliminate these local (temporary) inconsistencies, but the most natural mechanism can introduce permanent inconsistencies in the information contained in the dynamic model. These inconsistencies are similar to those that people have in their knowledge and beliefs. The mechanism presented is shown to be related to both the intensional isomorphism and impossible worlds approaches to this problem.

No abstract available.