Representing and Integrating Linguistic Knowledge

This paper describes a theory of the representation and use of linguistic knowledge in a natural language understanding system. The representation system draws much of its insight from the linguistic theory of Fillmore el al. (1988). This models knowledge of language as a large collection of grammatical constructions, each a description of a linguistic regularity. I describe a representation language for constructions, and principles for encoding linguistic knowledge in this representation. The second part of the theory is a conceptual analyzer which is designed to model the on-line nature of the hunmn language understanding mechanism. I discuss the core of this analyzer, an information-combining operation called integration which combines constructions to produce complete interpretations of an utterance.