Corega Tabs: Incremental Semantic Composition

In parsing natural language, incremental semantics composition is one of the most prominent issues. In the past, numerous approaches have been developed for assigning meaning to noun and verbal phrases and their complements and modifiers. Often, their inferential power is too low for practical applications or the expressiveness of the representation language leads to intractable inference procedures. As an answer to these problems, we discuss an approach that relies on Description Logics for handling this class of semantics construction. We show how a semantic knowledge base can be setup. We exploit the equivalence between Discourse Representation Structures limited to the expressiveness of ALC and ABoxes for validating DRS with respect to a given knowledge base. 1 Generic Dialogue Management in EMBASSI The long-term goal of our research is to design and implement a generic dialogue system for rational (spoken) dialogues, which helps a user to achieve certain goals in terms of operations of a technical application system – e.g. an information system, a system for controlling devices, or any other kind of problem solving system. Among its design criteria are the ability to recognize users’ intentions, to establish corresponding subgoals and control their processing. Furthermore, it shall enable mixed-initiative, flexible and cooperative conversations and provide a high level of robustness as well as scalability in the linguistic and application dimensions, which includes portability to new domains with as little effort as possible. It shall also be possible to integrate linguistic interaction with multimodal forms of input and output, as e.g. with graphical user interfaces and – by means of appropriate devices – the recognition of deictic actions.