The Implementation

Abstract

In the previous chapter we discussed intersentential ellipsis and some other dialogue phenomena at a theoretical level, to understand in general how they should be treated by a natural language understanding system. In this chapter we will look in detail at the internal workings of a system based on the idea that an interactive dialogue is a single, continuous event rather than a series of separate transactions. This natural language interface is implemented in a production system using an extended chart parsing technique. The first example will be the interpretation of a relatively simple full-sentence input, to acquaint the reader with the basic operation of the system, followed by examples dealing with more challenging situations.