tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION STRUCTURES"

Kamp's Discourse Representation T h e o r y is a major breakthrough regarding the systematic translation of natural language discourse into logical form. W e have therefore chosen to m a r r y the User Specialty Languages System, which was originally designed as a natural language frontend to a relational database system, with this n e w theory. In the paper w e try to s h o w taking - for the sake of simplicity - Kemp's fragment of English h o w this is achieved. | AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION STRUCTURES Franz Guenthner Universitãt Tubingen Wilhelmstr. 50 D-7400 Tubingen FRG Hubert Lehmann IBM Deutschland GmbH Heidelberg Scientific Center Tiergartenstr. 15 D-69OO Heidelberg FRG Abstract Kamp s Discourse Representation Theory is a major breakthrough regarding the systematic translation of natural language discourse into logical form. We have therefore chosen to marry the User Specialty Languages System which was originally designed as a natural language frontend to a relational database system with this new theory. In the paper we try to show taking - for the sake of simplicity - Kamp s fragment of English how this is achieved. The research reported is going on in the context of the project Linguistics and Logic Based Legal Expert System undertaken jointly by the IBM Heidelberg Scientific Center and the Universitat Tubingen. 1 Introduction In this paper we are concerned with the systematic translation of natural language discourse into Discourse Representation Structures as they are defined in Discourse Representation Theory DRT first formulated by Kamp 1981 . This theory represents a major breakthrough in that it systematically accounts for the context dependent interpretation of sentences in particular with regard to anaphoric relations. From a syntactic point of view however Kamp chose a very restricted fragment of English. It is our goal therefore to extend the syntactic coverage for DRT by linking it to the grammars described for the User Specialty Languages USL system Lehmann 1978 ott and Zoeppritz 1979 Lehmann 1980 Sopena 1982 Zoeppritz 1984 which are comprehensive enough to deal with realistic discourses. Our main tasks are then to describe - the syntactic framework chosen - Discourse Representation Structures DRSs - the translation from parse trees to DRSs The translation from parse trees to DRSs will as we shall see not proceed directly but rather via Intermediate Structures which were already .