The KERNEL Text Understanding System

This article describes KERNEL, a text understanding system developed at the Unisys Center for Advanced Information Technology. KERNEL's design is motivated by the need to make complex interactions possible among system modules, and to control the amount of reasoning done by those modules. We will explain how Kernel's architecture meets these needs, and how the architectures of similar systems compare in achieving the same goal. This work was partially supported by DARPA Contract N00014-85-C-0012. Paramax Systems Corporation is wholly owned by Unisys. ii m. palmer et. al.