Accession Number:

ADA188638

Title:

Responding to Semantically Ill-Formed Input,

Descriptive Note:

Corporate Author:

NEW YORK UNIV NY COURANT INST OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

Personal Author(s):

• Grishman, Ralph
• Peng, Ping

Report Date:

1987-09-01

Pagination or Media Count:

8.0

Abstract:

One cause of failure language interfaces is semantic overshoot this is reflected in input sentences which do not correspond to any semantic pattern in the system, We describe a system which provides helpful feedback in such cases by identifying the semantically closest inputs which the system would be able to understand. We propose to provide the user with sentences which are semantically close to the original input in a sense to be defined below and are acceptable inputs to the system. Such feedback may occasionally be confusing, but we expect that more often it will be helpful in showing the systems capabilities and suggesting possible rephrasings.

Descriptors:

• *INPUT
• *SEMANTICS
• *NATURAL LANGUAGE
• *COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
• FAILURE
• INTERFACES
• PATTERNS
• WORDS(LANGUAGE)
• SYNTAX
• DIAGNOSIS(GENERAL)

Subject Categories:

• Linguistics
• Computer Programming and Software

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE