Introduction to the Research Direction

In my opinion, the ultimate goal of NLP is to create a computer that really understands the meaning and information conveyed by a Natural Language (NL) text or speech. From a practical point of view, we would like computers to read and understand information in texts so that they could answer correctly questions about that information.2 From a scientific perspective, if a computer is able to understand a class of texts correctly, knowing how it does it might shed some interesting light on how humans do it. We need to define what is meant by “understanding the meaning and information in a text.” We take the operationalized definition: the ability to draw inferences from the text and answer questions about it in the same way that humans would given the same input. Since humans do not always agree about the inferences and answers to questions from a given NL text, we concentrate our research here on those cases where most people do agree, cases that are quite clear cut.