Integrating natural language processing and knowledge based processing

A central problem in text-understanding research is the in-determinacy of natural language. Two related issues that arise in confronting this problem are the need to make com-plex interactions possible among the system components that search for cues, and the need to control the amount of reasoning that is done once cues have been discovered. We identify a key d.ifEculty iu enabling true interaction among system components and we propose an architectural frame-work that minimizes this difficulty. A concrete example of a reasoning task encountered iu an actual text+mderstanding application is used to motivate the design principles of our framework