Description Logics for Natural Language Processing

In this paper we focus on the application of description logics to natural language processing. In cooperation with the {\sc pracma} project we have been developing a suitably extended knowledge representation system, called {\sc motel}. In our approach to agent modelling and natural language processing we use an extension of the well-known description language $\cal ALC$. Our system {\sc motel}\ serves on one hand as a knowledge base for the natural language front-end, and on the other hand, it provides powerful {\em logical\/} representation and reasoning components. As our approach is logic based we hope that this enhances the overall capabilities of the natural language processing (NLP) system. We present a brief overview of {\sc motel} and the different extensions we are working on, i.e.\ modal extension of description logics, a cardinality-based approach to quantitative information, reason maintenance, probablistic, non-monotonic, and abductive reasoning