Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation: Language for Knowledge and Knowledge for Language
Edited by Lucja M. Iwanska and Stuart C. Shapiro
470 pp., references, index, illus., $48.00 softcover, ISBN 978-0-262-59021-1
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Natural language refers to human language—complex, irregular, diverse, with all its philosophical problems of meaning and context. Setting a new direction in AI research, this book explores the development of knowledge representation and reasoning systems that take seriously the role of natural language in human information and knowledge processing.
Traditionally, knowledge representation and reasoning systems have incorporated natural language as interfaces to expert systems or knowledge bases that performed tasks separate from natural language processing. As this book shows, however, the computational nature of representation and inference in natural language makes it the ideal model for all tasks in an intelligent computer system. Natural language processing combines the qualitative characteristics of human knowledge processing with a computer's quantitative advantages, allowing for an in-depth, systematic processing of vast amounts of information. The essays in this interdisciplinary book cover a range of implementations and designs, from formal computational models to large-scale natural language processing systems.