The field of natural language processing already has quite a tradition in Yugoslavia but research is lacking in AI related areas, such as natural language understanding (NLU) and knowledge representation. In order to establish sound software support for such research we have been developing a system named SOVA.

SOVA - software environment for NLU of Slovenian language: U. of Edvard Kardelj in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia

INTRODUCTION Although the l i terature dealing with formal and natural languages abounds with theoretical arguments of worstcase performance by various parsing strategies [e.g. , Grif f i ths & Petrick, 1965; Aho & Ullman, 1972; Graham, Harrison & Ruzzo, Ig80], there is l i t t l e discussion of comparative performance based on actual practice in understanding natural language. Yet important practical considerations do arise when writ ing programs to understand one aspect or another of natural language utterances. Where, for example, a theorist wi l l characterize a parsing strategy according to i ts space and/or time requirements in attempting to analyze the worst possible input acc3rding to ~n arbi t rary grammar s t r i c t l y l imited in expressive power, the researcher studying Natural Language Processing can be jus t i f ied in concerning himself more with issues of practical performance in parsing sentences encountered in language as humans Actually use i t using a grammar expressed in a form corve~ie: to the human l inguist who is writ ing i t . Moreover, ~ r y occasional poor performance may be quite acceptabl:, part icular ly i f real-time considerations are not invo~ed, e.g., i f a human querant is not waiting for the answer to his question), provided the overall average performance is superior. One example of such a situation is o f f l ine Machine Translation.

SOVA - software environment for NLU of Slovenian language: U. of Edvard Kardelj in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia

References

A Practical Comparison of Parsing Strategies

A practical comparison of parsing strategies for machine translation and other natural language processing purposes

An Experiment in Machine Translation

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