Representing natural language with Prolog

Abstract

The authors describe the use of Prolog to build a syntactic list structure and a syntactic-semantic structure and to incorporate the semantic structure into a background structure that conveys the meanings of the individual words in the sentence in the context of general work knowledge. This semantic structure is then placed in the context of the sentence being parsed. Rather than rely solely on case grammar to represent the functions of words in a sentence, the authors have extended this technique to include a frame structure (which gives semantic details of the verb and the relations of other words to it) for a sentence's verbs to build the syntactic-semantic structure. Using this frame structure conveys more information than using only the case-grammar approach. The authors then place the syntactic-semantic structure in the context of its background knowledge, using the principles of partitioned networks in which word meanings are placed in a hierarchical structure that represents the background knowledge. >