Contemporary Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 1 5

N atural Language

Understanding

You may have had the experience of calling a utility or credit card company

with the hope of talking to an operator. Sometimes this scenario plays out

as follows. When an automated message asks you what you would like to do,

you a nswer, “Talk to an operator.” Then after being led in circles for quite a

while, the system hangs up on you. However, if things worked properly, the

system would “understand” your query and take the action of routing you to an

operator. This chapter concerns the development of algorithms that accomplish

such tasks.

We do not pursue the question of what it means to understand language ...