Computations from the English: A Procedural Logic Approach for Representing and Understanding English Texts

In this practical new book, Robert F. Simmons describes a procedural logic approach to the use of English for various computational areas. These areas include parsing and translating sentences and text, transforming English commands into robot actions, translating English questions into formal language queries to data bases, transforming text into knowledge bases that support questioning and summarizing, and communicating in general with specialized knowledge systems.

Among its many features, the book:

• introduces procedural logic informally and includes a documented interpreter, HCPRVR;
• provides an outline of linguistic case analysis and a system for representing sentences as semantic relations;
• develops a procedural logic grammar for translating sentences into semantic relations;
• describes canonical-form logic programs for commanding a robot and questioning a document data base;
• presents experimental systems for transforming narrative text into a knowledge representation, and questioning and summarizing;
• analyzes and compares various logic implementations of parsing algorithms and applies the techniques to paraphrasing and translating natural language;
• offers an example of an expert knowledge system and explores some possible approaches to text knowledge bases.