Multilingual Discourse Processing

The goal of the work reported here is to provide a system for handling spoken dialogues which can be easily ported to new languages and new application areas. This work is being carried within the Dumas project, which aims to explore a number of approaches to this task. The particular approach described here involves involes constructing fairly traditional ‘logical forms’ on the basis of structural analyses of the input speech and then using a mixture of meaning postulates, which relate terms in the language to underlying concepts, and general domain knowledge in order to interpret and respond to what has been said.