This report describes current research associated with the Automated Language Analysis Project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The focus of the research is upon the delineation of patterns formed in the linguistic coding of information; this delineation is called stylistic analysis. The report describes research on thesauri,…

This paper reports a portion of a research effort to develop a program which will simulate the language learning behavior of humans. Here presented is a heuristic parsing procedure which accepts natural language sentences and produces for each a form of analysis called a "labeled dependency tree." The formal grammar on which the…

Ways of making the natural language of unsophisticated computer users meaningful to the computer are discussed. The discussion is set within the context of the Rapidly Extensible Language (REL) System, a question answering system with underlying relational data bases. Major topics covered include individuals and predicates, the problem of verbs,…

This paper describes PAL--a new computer language. It is used as a pedagogical vehicle in an undergraduate subject called "Programming Linguistics." This subject is designed primarily for sophomores who anticipate a major professional interest in computer science and has two objectives. The first is to study linguistic constructs for the…

At present a computer system cannot be constructed for handling the totality of a natural language in any significant way. It is, however, possible to construct a system for communication in a narrow field of discourse. A working model for a specialized discourse based on a recognition grammar is discussed. Some properties of the recognition…

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…

The first part of this dissertation is a metatheoretical discussion of the needs and means of semantic analysis. This discussion includes sections on metalanguage, deep and surface structure and structural semantics, and procedures for relating the English of abstracts to a classification concordance in the same language. The second part describes…

Language teaching requires textbook material that contains the most frequent concepts of a language. The computer brings its tremendous information processing ability to the task of establishing word frequency rankings, but the computer is limited to counting word-forms and not semantic concepts. The most recent word frequency dictionaries, in…

The paper surveys the major projects on the understanding of natural language that fall within what may now be called the artificial intelligence paradigm of natural language systems. Some space is devoted to arguing that the paradigm is now a reality and different in significant respects from the generative paradigm of present-day linguistics.…

A computer-assisted instruction system, called IT1 (Interpretive Tutor), is described which is intended to assist a student's efforts to learn the content of textual material and to evaluate his efforts toward that goal. The text is represented internally in the form of semantic networks with auxiliary structures which relate network nodes to…

This is a description of the motivation and overall organization of the OWL language for knowledge representation. OWL consists of a linguistic memory system (LMS), a memory of concepts in terms of which all English phrases and all knowledge of an application domain are represented; a theory of English grammar which tells how to map English…

For the past 15 years there has been a serious interest in the processing of natural language (English) by researchers in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). This processing has included machine translation, question-answering systems, man-machine dialogue, and speech understanding. This interest has engendered an awareness of and a concern with the…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

This report is the third in a series of annual reports describing the research performed by Stanford Research Institute to provide the technology that will allow speech understanding systems to be designed and implemented for a variety of different task domains and environmental constraints. The current work is being carried out cooperatively with…

The second version of the Multistore Sentence Analysis System, implemented on an IBM 360/65, uses a correlational grammar to parse English sentences and displays the parsings as hierarchical syntactic structures comparable to tree diagrams. Since correlational syntax comprises much that is usually considered semantic information, the system…