Accession Number:

ADA230607

Title:

TACITUS: Text Understanding for Strategic Computing

Descriptive Note:

Final rept.

Corporate Author:

SRI INTERNATIONAL MENLO PARK CA

Personal Author(s):

• Hobbs, Jerry R.

Report Date:

1990-11-01

Pagination or Media Count:

343.0

Abstract:

The aim of the TACITUS project was to elaborate a theory of how knowledge is used in the interpretation of discourse, and to implement this theory in a computer system for understanding naturally generated texts. This research was carried out between May 1985 and September 1990. The principal results of the research were as follows 1 The development of a theory of inference in discourse interpretation based on weighted abduction. This has yielded a simple and elegant framework in which a broad range on linguistic phenomena can be investigated 2 The construction of a large knowledge base of commonsense knowledge, particularly for knowledge in the physical domain, with a more preliminary extension to social domains and 3 The implementation of the TACITUS system for text understanding, a system which has been applied in four different domains. The research done on this project can be classified into six areas--syntax, encoding commonsense knowledge, encoding domain knowledge, local pragmatics, task pragmatics, and knowledge acquisition.

Descriptors:

• *COMPUTERS
• TEXTBOOKS
• LINGUISTICS
• PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
• CODING

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE