We discuss the techniques we have developed and implemented for the cross-categorial treatment of comparatives in TELI, a natural language question-answering system that's transportable among both application domains and types of backend retrieval systems. For purposes of illustration, we shall consider the example sentences "List the cars at least 20 inches more than twice as long as the Century is wide" and "Have any US companies made at least 3 more large cars than Buick?" Issues to be considered include comparative inflections, left recursion and other forms of nesting, extraposition of comparative complements, ellipsis, the wh element "how", and the translation of normalized parse trees into logical form.

We discuss ways of allowing the users of a natural language processor to define, examine, and modify the definitions of any domain-specific words or phrases known to the system. An implementation of this work forms a critical portion of the knowledge acquisition component of our Transportable English-Language Interface (TELI). which answers English questions about tabular (first normal-form) data files and runs on a Symbolics Lisp Machine. However, our techniques enable the design of customization modules that are largely independent of the syntactic and retrieval components of the specific system they supply information to. In addition to its obvious practical value. this area of research is important because it requires careful attention to the formalisms used by a natural language system and to the interactions among the modules based on those formalisms.

The Layered Domain Class system (LDC) is an experimental natural language processor being developed at Duke University which reached the prototype stage in May of 1983. Its primary goals are (1) to provide English-language retrieval capabilities for structured but unnormalized data files created by the user; (2) to allow very complex semantics, in terms of the information directly available from the physical data file; and (3) to enable users to customize the system to operate with new types of data. In this paper we shall discuss (a) the types of modifiers LDC provides for; (b) how information about the syntax and semantics of modifiers is obtained from users; and (c) how this information is used to process English inputs.

article Free Access Share on LDC-1: a transportable, knowledge-based natural language processor for office environments Authors: Bruce W. Ballard Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NC Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NCView Profile , John C. Lusth Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NC Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NCView Profile , Nancy L. Tinkham Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NC Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ., Durham, NCView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Information SystemsVolume 2Issue 1Jan. 1984 pp 1–25https://doi.org/10.1145/357417.357418Published:01 January 1984Publication History 24citation436DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations24Total Downloads436Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks3 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 Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Recent years have seen important advances in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Although many problems remain, the goal of providing limited English-processing facilities for non-technical computer users is within sight. By the end of the decade, numerous systems providing limited coverage of "natural language" will be available for business and home use. Several systems (e.g. TQA [16]) have already become operational. One system (ROBOT [7]) has been supporting natural language inputs in a dozen or so different commercial database applications for at least three years. Many other systems have been developed to the prototype stage and will soon be able to be transferred, with varying degrees of effort, from a research to a production environment. Each system tends to provide special features of its own, and the future prospects for database, office, instructional, and other environments are quite exciting.