Parsing with constructions and ontology

Abstract

Weaddress two themes of the workshop: (A) Weargue against the standard design morphology-syntax- semantics-pragmatics. (R) Weargue for a close relationship between the knowledge representation language (used for reasoning) and the language for natural language processing. Regarding the first issue, we present a new model of natural language based on the concept of consgruclion, consisting of a set of features of form, a set of semantic and pragmatic conditions describing its application context, and a description of its meaning. A parser based on this modelallowed us to build a prototype of a natural language system: a front end to an on-line calendar application. With respect to the second issue, we show the advantages of embeddingontology into the grammar. Namely, our hierarchy of np constructions is based on the corresponding ontology. Wealso show how (A) and (R) related.