Semantic grammar: An engineering technique for constructing natural language understanding systems

One of the major stumbling blocks to more effective used computers by naive users is the lack of natural means of communication between the user and the computer system. As such this work falls somewhere between highly constrained formal language query systems and unrestricted natural language under-standing systems. The primary purpose of this research is not to advance our theoretical under-standing of natural language but rather to put forth a set of techniques for embedding both semantic/conceptual and pragmatic information into a useful natural language interface module. Our intent has been to produce a front end system which enables the user to concentrate on his problem or task rather than making him worry about how to communicate his ideas or questions to the machine.