ITRI Seminar: Thurs 21 Oct

David Milward
SRI, Cambridge

Robust Semantics for Dialogue Using Flat Structures


Dialogue utterances are rarely sentences and are often
fragmentary. This talk discusses some of the assumptions made by
shallow and deep approaches when mapping from a word lattice to an
output suitable for e.g. database query.  The talk advocates an
alternative approach using a 'flat' semantic representation where the
recursive structure is encoded implicitly via indexing. The aim is to
keep the robustness of shallow or keyword-based approaches, whilst
retaining the generality and formal nature of a full semantics.