CHORUS: Semantic Processing with Concurrent Constraints

A specialty of human language understanding is the ability to deal with missing or ambiguous information. Incomplete information is very common in realistic situations of communication between humans; sentences in spoken language for example might be pronounced unprecise, they might be ambiguous or even grammatically wrong. Humans are in most situations able to react in an appropriate manner, even when the meaning of the perceived utterance is not clear, or they can reconstruct the missing information by using knowledge about the context. Systems for natural language processing, too, have to be prepared to cope with this kind of imperfect input. Therefore the goal of the CHORUS project is to model this ability of human beings on a computer.

For this purpose methods for an underspecified representation of complex semantic information, which allow for efficient processing, are being developed. Integration of new developements in computational linguistics and innovative technologies from computer science, as in particular semantic underspecification and concurrent constraint programming, has proven to be a very effective means to this end.