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From: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport)
Subject: Re: Representations (was: Computational Psycholinguistics)
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References: <3goda4$8i9@pipe3.pipeline.com> <3hcoj9$85k@highway.LeidenUniv.nl> <3hilqk$1g2@cat.cis.Brown.EDU> <3hns7r$rof@dove.nist.gov>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 17:07:26 GMT
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>In article <3hilqk$1g2@cat.cis.Brown.EDU>, mj@cs.brown.edu (Mark Johnson) writes:
>...
>> In my humble opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of current
>> computational parsing models is that they are fundamentally designed
>> to answer the question ``Is this sentence a well-formed sentence of
>> the language?'' rather than the more relevant questions ``What does
>> this sentence mean?'' or ``What is the speaker trying to tell me?''.

The SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system's natural
language interface has always gone directly from the sentence to a
semantic network *semantic* representation without building an
intermediary syntactic representation.  (Ditto for Conceptual
Dependency, for that matter.)  For more on SNePS, see:

http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/pub/SNePS/WWW/index.html


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
			William J. Rapaport
			Associate Professor of Computer Science
			Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
			and Center for Cognitive Science

226 Bell Hall                  | phone:  (716) 645-3180 x 112
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