Natural language processing expert system: the system integrates five levels of linguistically-motivated processing to arrive at an unambiguous representation of the user's intent. Sherpa's technology is able to represent the meaning expressed through language in a conceptual, language-independent way, at an abstract level that is separate from any specific language. The engine is able to arrive at the correct analysis of ambiguous inputs by applying constraints during the analysis process that rule out all but the intended meaning, eliminating unlikely or impossible interpretations. A language-independent conceptual representation is referred to as an Interlingua. As a consequence, the time required to add a new language to Sherpa's set of supported languages is exponentially reduced. The core Sherpa system includes over 300,000 concepts and 5,000 syntactical and semantic rules, as well as the large dictionaries required to support these concepts.