Anthony Jameson

The Natural Language System HAM-RPM as a Hotel Manager: Some Representational Prerequisites

The dialogue system HAM-RPM simulates a person conversing about one of several interchangeable scenes in colloquial German. Attention is currently being focused on a hotel reservation situation in which the system is required to construct and make use of a model of its dialogue partner’s goals and beliefs. This situation calls for a semantic representation language which is declarative and which permits the representation, among other things, of various numerical and natural language quantifiers, conjoined noun phrases and belief modifiers. This paper describes this this language and sketches the processes in the course of which expressions of the language are analysed, constructed, transformed, or evaluated. The system’s behavior is described in detail to illustrate the relationships among these processes.

HAM-RPM (Hamburger Redepartnermodell): U. of Hamburg, FRG

The Natural Language system HAM-RPM simulates a dialogue partner conversing about one of several interchangeable scenes in colloquial German. The overall goals of the research have been twofold: simulating natural language dialogue behaviour by means of a computer is a promising and reliable method for establishing and testing theoretical models of language which beyond systematic properties try to integrate communicative and cognitive aspects. Second, in a variety of applications the accessability of other nonlinguistic computer systems can be enhanced by using natural language as a means of communication.

The anatomy of the natural language dialogue system, Bericht Nr. 12

A logical view of the cartographic information based on the Polygonal Subdivision is studied. A multi-purpose map is represented by a collection of several database relations related to each other. Some of them are entity relations expressing geographic entities, and others are relationship relations expressing various types of incidences among entities. Elementary data manipulation operations on the cartographic databases are studied, and implementation of geographic information systems is discussed. a human partner in colloquial German about limited, but interchangeable scenes. The objective of this report is to give a detailed, complete and self-contained description of the system in its present state of implementation. After a discussion of the goals and methodological principles which guide our research and a short introduction to the implementation language an overview of the system’s architecture, of its knowledge base and of the domains of discourse is given. Then each processing phase from the analysis of natural-language input to the generation of a natural-language utterance is described in detail. The examples used during these descriptions are supplemented by transcripts of complete dialogue sessions. Finally HAM-RPM’s programming environment is described.