Analyzing Telegraphic Messages

The particular class of messages which we have studied are a set of Navy tactical messages called RAINFORM (ship) sighting messages [8]. Several other researchers have previously constructed systems to analyze these messages. In the NOMAD system [1] the knowledge was principally realized as procedures associated with individual words. This made it difficult to extend the system, as Granger has noted [1]. Some of the shortcomings of the internal knowledge representation were remedied in a later system named VOX [5] which used a conceptual grammar, mixing syntactic and semantic constraints. However, the power of the grammar was still quite limited when compared to grammars traditionally used in computational linguistics applications. In the development of our system, in contrast, we have taken as our starting point a relatively broad coverage grammar of standard English. More generally, it has been our goal to use, to the extent possible, system components which would be appropriate to a general-purpose English language analyzer. We see several benefits to such an approach: