TITLE:		A SEMANTIC PARSER FOR UNDERSTANDING ILL-FORMED INPUT
AUTHORS:	Kathleen McCoy, Patrick Demasco, Yu Gong,
		Christopher Pennington and Charles Rowe
COMMENTS:	(c) 1989 RESNA Press. Reprinted with permission.


ABSTRACT:
In this paper we explore the integration of natural language
understanding techniques into augmentative communication systems. A
semantic parser is described which takes a string of words (chosen
from a word board) from the user and tries to identify a semantic
interpretation of those words. One goal is to allow the disabled
individual to input a compacted message (i.e., one containing mainly
the content words of the desired utterance) and eventually have the
intended message generated in full. This task requires that the
utterance first be understood. Understanding is complicated because we
expect the utterance to be largely ill-formed with respect to the
normal syntactic rules of the language. The ill-formedness constraint
has led us to develop a novel semantic parser which is driven by the
possible semantic interpretation of the individual words in the input
utterance.