Lexical semantics to infer discourse relations and domain knowledge


NL interfaces to instructional and educational applications need knowledge about how to act in a domain, and communication knowledge about how to talk about acting in a domain. Deriving such knowledge by hand is time consuming, error prone, and ultimately the reason why NL interfaces are often domain dependent. The work supported by the NSF CAREER award seeks to make fundamental progress to overcome this limitation by developing a methodology, algorithms and tools to semi-automatically derive domain and communication knowledge from text and dialogues. This work entails three steps.