Object-Oriented Approach to Discourse Understanding

In this paper, We explain a discourse understanding model, ADAM (Actual Discourse Assistant Model) [Numaoka 1988] and show the example of its practical use. In the computer system which has an knowledge base, it is a very important issue how a user communicates with the system. Natural language is one of the way to communicate with it, and the discourse understanding is necessary to comprehend natural language deeply. ADAM gives a more intuitive expression of the real world by introducing the object-oriented concept into situation semantics. In this model, an object has about the same meaning as the one which is called a parameter in situation semantics. An object is a unit of information to be operated by a knowledge system. All the information, such as the character of individual or a causal relation among objects, are extracted from the objects in a knowledge base. Thus, in ADAM, a knowledge system which has a natural language user interface system can cope with lots of user’s requests by utilizing these information.