Knowledge representation and reasoning for discourse understanding

Abstract

Extra-linguistic knowledge is necessary for discourse understanding. In this paper, we classify the knowledge, and present a framework to describe it using frames and rules. With this framework, it is easy to represent an IS-A hierarchy, which is based on a classification by different viewpoints, and to describe functions of objects as declarative knowledge. Furthermore, to treat ambiguities in discourse understanding and to process utterances based on assumptions, the system has a world mechanism for inference. Lastly, we report the evaluation of this framework through the knowledge representation of a VCR and the conversation experiment by the dialogue system.