Talk Abstract

Although much of the work carried out within the Language Technology
Group over the last 5 years has focussed on shallow processing of
text, we are now beginning to explore applications where useful and
interesting results can be obtained using a more traditional
rule-based approach which requires a representation of meaning and
knowledge. I will focus particularly on recent LTG work involving
spoken dialogue systems. In general, the overall success of such
systems depends on achieving an adequate understanding of the
speaker's intended meaning, even if there are errors in word
recognition or syntactic parsing. The kinds of questions which then
arise are:   

*  How does taxonomic reasoning interact with other kinds of inference
   in natural language understanding? 

*  How does plan construction enter into the semantic interpretation
   of natural language commands?

Ewan's home page is: 
http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Ewan_Klein.html