natural language processing Papers

Websites of businesses should accommodate both customer needs and business requirements. Traditional menu-driven navigation and key word search do not allow users to describe their intentions precisely. We have developed a conversational interface to online shopping that provides convenient, personalized access to information using natural language dialog. User studies show significantly reduced length of interactions in terms of time and number of clicks in finding products. The core dialog engine is easily adaptable to other... Read more

We propose a conversational agent that can act as a virtual representative of a web site interacting with visitors using natural languages. The agent consists of three main components: dialogue act categorization, structured pattern matching, and knowledge construction and representation. Dialogue acts are identified by automata which accept sequences of keywords defined for each of the dialogue acts. We use these DAs to identify the user’s intention. To make the DA analysis process more effective,... Read more

In this paper, we introduce a conversational agent which is applied to the food-ordering dialog system. It uses VenusDictate as speech recognition front-end, then understands the semantics of the input sentence by extracting the keywords of the sentence, finally it interacts with the user by speech. The experimental results show that the performance of this agent is good in this application domain. Read more

The programming language, Prolog, was born of a project aimed not at producing a programming language but at processing natural languages; in this case, French. The project gave rise to a preliminary version of Prolog at the end of 1971 and a more definitive version at the end of 1972. This article gives the history of this project and describes in detail the preliminary and then the final versions of Prolog. The authors also felt it... Read more

Much of the Artificial Intelligence community is now aware of a computer simulation of paranoid processes developed by the Colby group at Stanford. The model (called PARRY) has been available for interviewing on the ARPA network and thousands of interviews have been conducted with several versions of the model. During the long period of development of the model, we have been aware of the limitations of various alternative programming approaches to designing an algorithm capable... Read more

The aim of the research reported here was to discover methods for building computer programs which can understand and communicate with people in a non-trivial subset of English. A computer program understands a subset of English if it accepts input sentences which are members of this subset, and answers questions based on information contained in the input. We describe in this paper a semantic theory of discourse, and utilize a first approximation to the analytical... Read more