This special issue presents the state-of-the-art in implemented, general-purpose Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that use nontrivial Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). These systems use full-scale implementations of traditional KRR techniques as well as some newer knowledge-related processing mechanisms that have been developed specifically to meet the needs of natural language processing. The papers cover a wide range of natural language inputs, knowledge and formalisms, application domains and processing tasks, illustrating the key role that knowledge representation plays in all types of NLP systems.

Natural language interfaces require dialogue models that allow for robust, habitable and efficient interaction. This paper presents such a model for dialogue management for natural language interfaces. The model is based on empirical studies of human computer interaction in various simple service applications. It is shown that for applications belonging to this class the dialogue can be handled using fairly simple means. The interaction can be modeled in a dialogue grammar with information on the functional role of an utterance as conveyed in the linguistic structure. Focusing is handled using dialogue objects recorded in a dialogue tree representing the constituents of the dialogue. The dialogue objects in the dialogue tree can be accessed by the various modules for interpretation, generation and background system access. Focused entities are modeled in entities pertaining to objects or sets of objects, and related domain concept information; properties of the domain objects. A simple copying principle, where a new dialogue object's focal parameters are instantiated with information from the preceding dialogue object, accounts for most context dependent utterances. The action to be carried out by the interface is determined on the basis of how the objects and related properties are specified. This in turn depends on information presented in the user utterance, context information from the dialogue tree and information in the domain model. The use of dialogue objects facilitates customization to the sublanguage utilized in a specific application. The framework has successfully been applied to various background systems and interaction modalities. In the paper results from the customization of the dialogue manager to three typed interaction applications are presented together with results from applying the model to two applications utilizing spoken interaction.

We describe the natural language processing and knowledge representation components of B2, a collaborative system that allows medical students to practice their decision-making skills by considering a number of medical cases that differ from each other in a controlled manner. The underlying decision-support model of B2 uses a Bayesian network that captures the results of prior clinical studies of abdominal pain. B2 generates story-problems based on this model and supports natural language queries about the conclusions of the model and the reasoning behind them. B2 benefits from having a single knowledge representation and reasoning component that acts as a blackboard for intertask communication and cooperation. All knowledge is represented using a propositional semantic network formalism, thereby providing a uniform representation to all components. The natural language component is composed of a generalized augmented transition network parser/grammar and a discourse analyzer for managing the natural language interactions. The knowlege representation component supports the natural language component by providing a uniform representation of the content and structure of the interaction, at the parser, discourse, and domain levels. This uniform representation allows distinct tasks, such as dialog management, domain-specific reasoning, and meta-reasoning about the Bayesian network, to all use the same information source, without requiring mediation. This is important because there are queries, such as Why?, whose interpretation and response requires information from each of these tasks. By contrast, traditional approaches treat each subtask as a “black-box” with respect to other task components, and have a separate knowledge representation language for each. As a result, they have had much more difficulty providing useful responses.

This paper describes the approach to knowledge representation taken in the LaSIE Information Extraction (IE) system. Unlike many IE systems that skim texts and use large collections of shallow, domain-specific patterns and heuristics to fill in templates, LaSIE attempts a fuller text analysis, first translating individual sentences to a quasi-logical form, and then constructing a weak discourse model of the entire text from which template fills are finally derived. Underpinning the system is a general ‘world model’, represented as a semantic net, which is extended during the processing of a text by adding the classes and instances described in that text. In the paper we describe the system's knowledge representation formalisms, their use in the IE task, and how the knowledge represented in them is acquired, including experiments to extend the system's coverage using the WordNet general purpose semantic network. Preliminary evaluations of our approach, through the Sixth DARPA Message Understanding Conference, indicate comparable performance to shallower approaches. However, we believe its generality and extensibility offer a route towards the higher precision that is required of IE systems if they are to become genuinely usable technologies.

A large collection of texts may be reached through the Internet and this provides a powerful platform from which common-sense knowledge may be gathered. This paper presents a system that contains a core knowledge base structured around WordNet, a lexical database, capable of extracting contextual information from a given input text. Such context information is then used to retrieve other texts from the Internet that relate to that context. When processed by the system, these new texts bring more information that represents an enhanced domain context for the initial text. This is an incremental method for text processing that acquires domain knowledge from other texts. The paper describes the system architecture, its core knowledge base and inference engine, and the acquisition of new knowledge from corpora.

This paper presents a new type of nonlinear discourse structure found to be very common in free English texts. This structure reflects nonlinear presentation of the information and knowledge conveyed by the texts. It is argued that such nonlinearity is representationally and informationally advantageous because it allows one to create smaller, more compact texts. The paper presents a heuristics-based, relatively domain-independent algorithm for computing this new text structure. The paper discusses good quantitative and qualitative performance of the algorithm, and presents the results of the extensive tests on a large volume of free English texts.

In this paper, we introduce a method to represent phrase structure grammars for building a large annotated corpus of Korean syntactic trees. Korean is different from English in word order and word compositions. As a result of our study, it turned out that the differences are significant enough to induce meaningful changes in the tree annotation scheme for Korean with respect to the schemes for English. A tree annotation scheme defines the grammar formalism to be assumed, categories to be used, and rules to determine correct parses for unsettled issues in parse construction. Korean is partially free in word order and the essential components such as subjects and objects of a sentence can be omitted with greater freedom than in English. We propose a restricted representation of phrase structure grammar to handle the characteristics of Korean more efficiently. The proposed representation is shown by means of an extensive experiment to gain improvements in parsing time as well as grammar size. We also describe the system named Teb that is a software environment set up with a goal to build a tree annotated corpus of Korean containing more than one million units.

In this paper, we describe NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), a language designed for representing, in a standardized way, the semantic content (the ‘meaning’) of complex narrative texts. After having introduced informally the four ‘components’ (specialized sub-languages) of NKRL, we will describe (some of) the data structures proper to each of them, trying to show that the NKRL coding retains the main informational elements of the original narrative expressions. We will then focus on an important subset of NKRL, the so-called AECS sub-language, showing in particular that the operators of this sub-language can be used to represent some sorts of ‘plural’ expressions.