TITLE: 		A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPROACH TO DEVELOPING AN
		OBJECT-ORIENTED LEXICAL ACCESS DATABASE AND SEMANTIC
		REASONING MODULE
AUTHORS:	Wendy Mair Zickus
COMMENTS:	Master's Thesis; UD Technical Report

ABSTRACT:
The concept of enabling computers to understand and generate `natural'
language has been enticing to mankind ever since we first saw and
heard HAL in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." However, the state of
the art in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a long way from
creating a reality of this concept. One of the major bottlenecks in
the implementation of NLP is the lexicon: the place where the system's
information about words is stored. There are difficulties in deciding
what information should be stored in a lexicon, and even greater
difficulties in acquiring this information. To date there have been
several efforts which provide on-line lexical database resources with
varying amounts of lexical information for NLP systems. One problem
that remains, however, is that a particular NLP application may need
information from several such sources, and there is no standard way to
access and combine information from several lexical resources.

This thesis describes the Language Access Database (LAD) system, a
system designed to incorporate multiple lexical databases and tools
under one consistent functional interface in order to facilitate
systems requiring syntactic, semantic and lexical knowledge. The
technical aspects of the design were mainly influenced by research in
the areas of Computational Lexical Semantics, Augmentative and
Alternative Communication, and Natural Language Processing. The
implementational aspects of the design were influenced by the paradigm
of Object-Oriented programming to create a system that is easily
extendable and upgradable.

This thesis presents LAD and the Semantic Reasoning Module (SRM), a
semantic parsing system designed to test the LAD system's
functionality.