article

Free access

Meta-rules as a basis for processing ill-formed input

Authors:

Ralph M. Weischedel,

Norman K. SondheimerAuthors Info & Claims

Computational Linguistics, Volume 9, Issue 3-4

Pages 161 - 177

Published: 01 July 1983 Publication History

Abstract

If natural language processing systems are ever to achieve natural, cooperative behavior, they must be able to process input that is ill-formed lexically, syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. Systems must be able to partially understand, or at least give specific, appropriate error messages, when input does not correspond to their model of language and of context.We propose meta-rules and a control structure under which they are invoked as a framework for processing ill-formed input. The left-hand side of a meta-rule diagnoses a problem as a violated rule of normal processing. The right-hand side relaxes the violated rule and states how processing may be resumed, if at all.Examples discussed in the paper include violated grammatical tests, omitted articles, homonyms, spelling/typographical errors, unknown words, violated selection restrictions, personification, and metonymy. An implementation of a meta-rule processor within the framework of an augmented transition network parser is also described.

References

[1]

Aho, A. V. and Ullman, J. 1972 The Theory of Parsing, Transiation, and Compiling, Vol. 1. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.]]

[2]

Bates, M. 1976 Syntax in Automatic Speech Understanding. American Journal of Computational Linguistics Microfiche 45.]]

[3]

Bobrow, R. J. 1978 The RUS System. In Webber, B. L. and Bobrow, R., eds., Research in Natural Language. BBN Report No. 3378. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.]]

[4]

Bobrow, R. J. and Webber, B. 1980a PSI-KLONE: Parsing and Semantic Interpretation in the BBN Natural Language Understanding System, Proceedings of the 1980 Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence. CSCSI/SCEIO.]]

[5]

Bobrow, R. J. and Webber, B. 1980b Knowledge Representation for Syntactic/Semantic Processing. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI.]]

[6]

Bruce, B. 1975 Case Systems for Natural Language. Artificial Intelligence 6(4): 327--360.]]

[7]

Burton, R. R. and Brown, J. S. 1977 Semantic Grammar: A Technique for Constructing Natural Language Interfaces to Instructional Systems. BBN Report No. 3587. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.]]

[8]

Carberry, S. 1983 Tracking User Goals in an Information-Seeking Environment. Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Washington, D. C.: 59--63.]]

[9]

Carberry, S. 1984 Understanding Pragmatically Ill-formed Input. Proceedings of COLING 84.]]

[10]

Carbonell, J. G. 1979 Towards a Self-Extending Parser. Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. La Jolla, California: 3--8.]]

[11]

Carbonell, J. G.; Boggs, W. M.; Mauldin, M. L.; and Anick, P. G. 1983 The XCALIBUR Project: A Natural Language Interface to Expert Systems. Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Karlsruhe, West Germany: 653--656.]]

[12]

Chang, C. L. 1978 Finding Missing Joins for Incomplete Queries in Relational Data Bases. Research Report RJ2145. IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California.]]

[13]

Charniak, E. 1983 A Parser with Something for Everyone. In King, Margaret, ed., Parsing Natural Languages. Academic Press, New York, New York.]]

[14]

Eastman, C. M. and McLean, D. S. 1981 On the Need for Parsing Ill-formed Input. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 7(4): 257.]]

[15]

Fineman, L. 1983 Questioning the Need for Parsing Ill-formed Inputs. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 9(1): 22.]]

[16]

Fromkin, V. A., ed. 1973 Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence. Janua Linguarum, Series maior 77. Mouton, The Hague.]]

[17]

Gawron, J. M.; King, J.; Lamping, J.; Loebner, E.; Paulson, E. A.; Pullum, G. K.; Sag, I. A.; and Wasow, T. 1982 The GPSG Linguistic System. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Associaton for Computational Linguistics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 74--81.]]

[18]

Granger, R. H.; Staros, C. J.; Taylor, G. B.; and Yoshii, R. 1983 Scruffy Text Understanding: Design and Implementation of the NOMAD System. Proceedings of the Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing. Santa Monica, California: 104--106.]]

[19]

Harris, L. R. 1977a ROBOT: A High Performance Natural Language Interface for Data Base Query. Technical Report TR 77-1. Department of Mathematics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.]]

[20]

Harris, L. R. 1977b User Oriented Data Base Query with the ROBOT Natural Language Query System. International Journal for Man-Machine Studies 9: 697--713.]]

[21]

Harris, L. R. 1978 The ROBOT System: Natural Language Processing Applied to Data Base Query. Proceedings 1978 AnnualConference, Association for Computing Machinery. Washington, D. C.: 165--172.]]

[22]

Hayes, P. J. and Carbonell, J. G. 1981 Multi-strategy Construction-Specific Parsing for Flexible Data Base Query and Update. Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Vancouver, BC: 432--439.]]

[23]

Hayes, P. and Mouradian, G. 1980 Flexible Parsing. Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Parasession on Topics on Interactive Discourse. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 97--103.]]

[24]

Heidorn, G. E. 1975 Augmented Phrase Structure Grammars. Proceedings of the Workshop: Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1--5.]]

[25]

Hendrix, G. G.; Sacerdoti, E. E.; Sagalowicz, D.; and Slocum, J. 1978 Developing a Natural Language Interface to Complex Data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 3(2): 105--147.]]

[26]

Jensen, K. E. and Heidorn, G. E. 1983 The Fitted Parse: 100% Parsing Capability in a Syntactic Grammar of English. Proceedings of the Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing. Santa Monica, California: 93--98.]]

[27]

Kroch, A. S. 1981 On the Role of Resumptive Pronouns in Amnestying Island Constraint Violations. The Proceedings of the 17th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.]]

[28]

Kwasny, S. C. and Sondheimer, N. K. 1981 Relaxation Techniques for Parsing Ill-formed Input. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 7(2): 99--108.]]

[29]

Linde, C. and Labov, W. 1975 Spatial Network as a Site for the Study of Language and Thought. Language 51(4): 924--938.]]

[30]

Malhotra, A. 1975 Design Criteria for a Knowledge-Based English Language System for Management: An Experimental Analysis. MAC TR 146. Project MAC, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]]

[31]

Miller, L. A.; Heidorn, G. E.; and Jensen, K. 1981 Text-critiquing with the EPISTLE System: An Author's Aid to Better Syntax. AFIPS Conference Proceedings, 1981 NCC. AFIPS Press, Montvale, New Jersey: 649--655.]]

[32]

Ramshaw, L. A. and Weischedel, R. M. 1984 Problem Localization Strategies for Pragmatics in Natural Language Front Ends. Proceedings of COLING 84.]]

[33]

Robinson, J. J. 1982 DIAGRAM: A Grammar for Dialogues. Communications of the ACM 25 (1): 27--46.]]

[34]

Ross, J. R. 1979 Where's English. In Fillmore, C. J.; Kempler, D.; and Wang, W.S-Y., eds., Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior. Academic Press, New York, New York: 127--163.]]

[35]

Sager, N. 1981 Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammar of English and its Applications. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts.]]

[36]

Schank, R. C.; Lebowitz, M.; and Birnbaum, L. 1980 An Integrated Understander. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 6(1): 13--30.]]

[37]

Sondheimer, N. K.; Weischedel, R. M.; and Bobrow, R. J. 1984 A Knowledge Representation for Semantic Interpretation. Proceedings of COLING 84.]]

[38]

Thompson, B. H. 1980 Linguistic Analysis of Natural Language Communication with Computers. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Tokyo, Japan: 190--201.]]

[39]

Trawick, D. J. 1983 Robust Sentence Analysis and Habitability. Technical Report 5074:TR:83. Computer Science Department, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.]]

[40]

Walker, D. E. 1978 Understanding Spoken Language. North-Holland, New York, New York.]]

[41]

Waltz, D. L. 1978 An English Language Question Answering System for a Large Relational Database. Communications of the ACM 21(7): 526--539.]]

[42]

Warren, D. H. D.; Pereira, L. M.; and Pereira, F. 1977 PROLOG -- The Language and its Implementation Compared to LISP. SIGPLAN Notices 12(8): 109--115.]]

[43]

Weischedel, R. M. and Black, J. 1980 Responding Intelligently to Unparsable Inputs. American Journal of Computational Lingustics 6(2): 97--109.]]

[44]

Weischedel, R. M. and Sondheimer, N. K. 1982 An Improved Heuristic for Ellipsis Processing. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 85--88.]]

[45]

Weischedel, R. M.; Voge, W. M.; and James, M. 1978 An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Language Instruction. Artificial Intelligence 10: 225--240.]]

[46]

Wilks, Y. A. 1975 A Preferential Pattern-Seeking Semantics for Natural Language Inference. Artificial Intelligence 6: 53--74.]]

[47]

Wilks, Y. 1976 Natural Language Understanding Systems Within the AI Paradigm -- A Survey and Some Comparisons. American Journal of Computational Linguistics Microfiche 40.]]

[48]

Winograd, T. 1972 Understanding Natural Language. Academic Press, New York, New York.]]

[49]

Woods, W. A. 1970 Transition Network Grammars for Natural Language Analysis. Communications of the ACM 13(10): 591--606.]]

[50]

Woods, W. A. 1973 Progress in Natural Language Understanding--An Application to Lunar Geology. AFIPS Conference Proceedings. 42. AFIPS Press, Montvale, New Jersey: 441--450.]]

[51]

Woods, W. A.; Kaplan, R. M.; and Nash-Webber, B. 1972 The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System: Final Report. BBN Report No. 2378. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.]]

[52]

Woods, W. A.; Bates, M.; Brown, G.; Cook, C.; Klovstad, J.; Makhoul, J.; Nash-Webber, B.; Schwartz, R.; Wolf, J.; and Zue, V. 1976 Speech Understanding Systems: Final Report. Volumes 1--5. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts.]]

Cited By

De ilarraza AGojenola KOronoz MAlegria I(2011)Syntactic error detection and correction in date expressions using finite-state transducersNatural Language Engineering10.1017/S135132491100008817:2(145-161)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1351324911000088
Ibrahim ZNoah SNoor M(2010)Rules for ontology population from text of Malaysia medicinal herbs domainProceedings of the 5th international conference on Rough set and knowledge technology10.5555/1929344.1929405(386-394)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1929344.1929405
Maniadakis MTani J(2009)Acquiring Rules for RulesAdaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems10.1177/105971230810173917:1(58-80)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1177/1059712308101739
Show More Cited By

Meta-rules as a basis for processing ill-formed input
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
2. Hardware
  1. Power and energy
    1. Power estimation and optimization

Recommendations

Interpreting syntactically ill-formed sentences
ACL '84/COLING '84: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

The paper discusses three different kinds of syntactic ill-formedness: ellipsis, conjunctions, and actual syntactic errors. It is shown how a new grammatical formalism, based on a two-level representation of the syntactic knowledge is used to cope with ...
Handling ill-formed natural language input for an intelligent tutoring system
A natural language parser with interleaved spelling correction supporting lexical functional grammar and ill-formed input

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Computational Linguistics

Computational Linguistics Volume 9, Issue 3-4

Special issue on ill-formed input

July-December 1983

91 pages

ISSN:0891-2017

EISSN:1530-9312

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

MIT Press

Cambridge, MA, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 1983

Published in COLI Volume 9, Issue 3-4

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

40
Total Citations
View Citations
346
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)13

Reflects downloads up to 18 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

De ilarraza AGojenola KOronoz MAlegria I(2011)Syntactic error detection and correction in date expressions using finite-state transducersNatural Language Engineering10.1017/S135132491100008817:2(145-161)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1351324911000088
Ibrahim ZNoah SNoor M(2010)Rules for ontology population from text of Malaysia medicinal herbs domainProceedings of the 5th international conference on Rough set and knowledge technology10.5555/1929344.1929405(386-394)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1929344.1929405
Maniadakis MTani J(2009)Acquiring Rules for RulesAdaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems10.1177/105971230810173917:1(58-80)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1177/1059712308101739
Fan JBarker KPorter B(2009)Automatic interpretation of loosely encoded inputArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2008.10.007173:2(197-220)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.artint.2008.10.007
Hale JShafran IYung LDorr BHarper MKrasnyanskaya ALease MLiu YRoark BSnover MStewart R(2006)PCFGs with syntactic and prosodic indicators of speech repairsProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 44th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics10.3115/1220175.1220196(161-168)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/1220175.1220196
Foster JVogel C(2004)Parsing Ill-Formed Text Using an Error GrammarArtificial Intelligence Review10.1023/B:AIRE.0000036259.68818.1e21:3-4(269-291)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1023/B%3AAIRE.0000036259.68818.1e
Gojenola KOronoz MByron DVanderheyden P(2000)Corpus-based syntactic error detection using syntactic patternsProceedings of the ANLP-NAACL 2000 workshop on Student research10.5555/974456.974461(24-29)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2000
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/974456.974461
Min KWilson WBoitet CWhitelock P(1998)Integrated control of chart items for error repairProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics - Volume 210.3115/980691.980711(862-868)Online publication date: 10-Aug-1998
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/980691.980711
McCoy KPennington C(1998)Compansion: From research prototype to practical integrationNatural Language Engineering10.1017/S13513249980018434:1(73-95)Online publication date: 1-Mar-1998
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1351324998001843
Mitjushin LTsujii J(1996)An agreement corrector for RussianProceedings of the 16th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 210.3115/993268.993303(776-781)Online publication date: 5-Aug-1996
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/993268.993303
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents