Date of Award

8-1982

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Dionysios Kountanis

Second Advisor

Dr. Hamilton

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

A computer system for natural language understanding is presented in this thesis. The system attempts to understand English in a limited domain, a kindergarten-level story about three frogs and a puppy. The system is designed with two modes of operations: the text of the story is processed and its information incorporated into a knowledge database; and as a test of the system's understanding, the system answers questions from the user about the text. If any parts of the test or questions cannot be processed, the user is asked for clarification. The functions of this system are described and analyzed. A review of other natural language understanding systems and programs and an extensive bibliography are included.

Currently, the system processes the text of the story, incorporates it into a knowledge database, and will show the contents of that database. The question answering and asking capabilities are not implemented at this time.

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