Parsing into discourse object descriptions

Abstract

This paper reports work on the design of a natural language interface with a limited dialogue capability. It is argued that (i) The interpretation of the input is preferably represented as a structure of Discourse Object Descriptions (DODs); (ii) The DODs must be determined on the basis of different types of knowledge such as grammatical knowledge, object type deirmitions and knowledge about existing discourse objects and their discourse status; (iii) The different types of knowledge are stored separately but integrated in the interpretation process which is based on constraints.