TITLE:		A DOMAIN INDEPENDENT SEMANTIC PARSER FOR COMPANSION
AUTHORS:	Kathleen McCoy, Patrick Demasco, Mark Jones,
		Christopher Pennington and Charles Rowe
COMMENTS:	(c) 1990 RESNA Press. Reprinted with permission.


ABSTRACT:
This work is part of an augmentative communication project being
conducted at the Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories at the
University of Delaware and the A.I. duPont Institute. The goal of this
project is to increase the communication rate of physically disabled
individuals via Natural Language Processing techniques.

We wish to take as input a compressed message (i.e., one containing
mainly the content words of the desired utterance) from the disabled
individual and yet pass a syntactically and semantically well-formed
utterance to a speech synthesizer or text preparation system. At the
same time, we wish to do this by placing as little a burden on the
user as possible (Demasco et al., 89). Thus, we are not interested in
a simple coding system (cf. (Baker, 82)) where sentences have been
stored and are simply indexed by their content words.

The system is broken into several phases. The first phase, the
semantic parser (see also (Small&Rieger, 82)) is responsible for
determining the semantic role being played by each input word. It must
determine which word is the verb, what role each noun phrase plays
with respect to the verb (e.g., actor, theme), and what modification
relationships are present. The resulting semantic representation is
then passed to the translation component which is responsible for
replacing the semantic terms with their language-specific
instantiations. The final phase of the processing is a sentence
generator which forms a syntactically correct sentence. This paper is
concerned primarily with the semantic parser.