Research and Development in Natural Language Understanding as Part of the Strategic Computing Program. Volume 1. Overview of Technical Results. Revision.

This is volume one of a three volume final report. This volume, Volume 1, provides a technical overview of the effort. Chapter 1 is the Executive Summary. Chapter 2 overviews the effort as a whole reporting on 1 Our Integration of software and results from other Strategic Computing contractors, 2 Our participation in Fleet Command Center Battle Management Program, 3 Distribution of the resulting software to other sites, and efforts, and 4 Contributions of the work to the state of the art. The problem of acquiring linguistic knowledge is the chief obstacle to widespread use of natural language technology. Chapters 3 and 6 report results of five to tenfold increase in our productivity in moving the natural language shells to new application domains. The ability of natural language systems to cooperatively handle novel, errorful, or incomplete forms is also critical chapters 5 and 7 report new techniques to intelligently and gracefully respond to such forms. Chapter 4 reports on an implementation of a discourse module for understanding definite reference. Author kr