From Sentence Processing to Multimedia Information Access

The Problem: It has become clear that a robust full-text natural language question-answering system cannot realistically be expected any time soon. Numerous problems such as intersentential reference and paraphrasing, summarization, common sense implication, and many more, will take a long time to solve to everybody’s satisfaction. At the same time, however, it turns out that given a sophisticated grammar, a large lexicon enhanced by advances in Lexical Semantics, and an inference engine, it is possible to build a natural language system with satisfactory sentence-level performance.