A natural language understanding system for reference resolution in information dialogues

The benefits of a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system for information seeking can only be realised if the system allows for effective communication. The system should be able to deal with the interpretation of referring expressions in dialogue, such as anaphors and ellipsis. In this paper, the components which comprise a NLU system to deal with continuous dialogue are described. Given that the syntactic and semantic information can produce a suitable representation of each utterance, pragmatic information may be used to determine how this contextual information determines the interpretation of subsequent utterances. It is suggested that the approach taken allows the system to provide a cooperative response to assist the user in attaining the information seeking goal