A Research Study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Engineering and Technology

Research Studies Project Report (M. SC.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1985

This study is concerned with Natural Language Processing using the muSTAR Artificial Intelligence Development System o n the APPLE II. The LISP interpreter is not currently available on t h e RCC mainframe. An attempt h as been mad e to develop a workable system for syntactic and semantic analysis, with in the constraints of the Micro. The system for syntactic analysis was based on rules satisfies the needs of information retrieval . The system parses an English sentence into constituent phrases, which are in turn decomposed into words, and assigns the corresponding lexical categories to the individual words. The system is purely syntax -based , and adopts the ' bottom-up with to p - down filtering ' parsing strategy to produce the Parse Tree. Semantic Analysis was done using Schank ' s Conceptual Dependency theory which is based on the representation of meaning in terms of a small set of semantic primitives. It produces the CD parse of a n English sentence , i.e. identifies the Actor, Action, Object a nd Direction slots associated with a n Event. This system is an adaptation of Riesbeck ' s micro version of the English Language Interpreter to muSTAR AIDs. This system can be used a s a front-end for knowledge-based Natural Language Processing Systems.