A computational model of verbal understanding

Abstract

The long-term goal for computational linguistics is to increase our understanding of linguistic and conceptual structures and to formally describe them so that computers can deal effectively with natural languages in such applications as question answering, stylistic and content analysis, essay writing, automated translation, etc. The eventual realization of this goal requires not only a satisfactory model of linguistic structures, but also models for verbal understanding and verbal meaning. In this paper we outline a theory and a model of verbal understanding and describe Protosynthex III, an experimental implementation of the model in the form of a general-purpose language processing system. The effectiveness of the model in representing the process of verbal understanding is demonstrated in terms of Protosynthex III's capability to disambiguate English sentences, to answer a range of English questions and to derive and generate meaning-preserving paraphrases.