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An Action Representation Formalism to Interpret Natural Language Instructions
Author(s) -
Eugenio Barbara Di
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
computational intelligence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1467-8640
pISSN - 0824-7935
DOI - 10.1111/0824-7935.00057
Subject(s) - computer science , formalism (music) , natural language , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , rotation formalisms in three dimensions , natural language understanding , programming language , theoretical computer science , mathematics , art , musical , visual arts , geometry
The focus of this paper is on an action representation formalism that encodes both linguistic and planning knowledge about actions, and that supports the interpretation of complex Natural Language instructions and, in particular, of instructions containing Purpose Clauses. The representation uses linguistically motivated primitives, derived from Jackendoff's work on Conceptual Semantics, and is embedded in the description logic based system CLASSIC. I first motivate the characteristics of the formalism as needed to understand Natural Language instructions. I then describe the formalism itself, and I argue that the integration of a linguistically motivated lexical semantics formalism and of a description logic based system is beneficial to both. Finally, I show how the formalism is exploited by the algorithm that interprets Purpose Clauses. The output of the algorithm is used in the Animation from NL project, that has as its goal the automatic creation of animated task simulations.