NATURAL LANGUAGE ANALYSING APPARATUS AND METHOD

NATURAL LANGUAGE ANALYZING APPARATUS AND METHOD A natural language (NL) analyzing system is provided with a capability to analyze NL expressions and to resolve ambiguities and present them to the user for verification of correct interpretation. An essential feature of the invention is the use of a conceptual model of the system relevant to the application in which the invention is implemented. The model is created (customizing the system) by the user, and is stored as a conceptual schema. The schema is built of logical facts representing entities (concepts) and relationships between entities, forming a description of the universe of discourse or object system in question. The entities of the schema have at least one external connection, namely to natural language terms in a vocabulary. The schema itself is completely language independent, though the components of it may have "names" expressed in a natural language such as English. There may be a second connection to the entities, namely where the system is used in a query system for relational data bases. In this case the entities of the schema represent objects in the data base, and thus there is a connection between the entities and those objects of the data base. The actual analysis of NL expressions is performed by a Natural Language Engine (NLE) in cooperation with an Analysis Grammar and the schema. The analysis results in an intermediate, language independent logic form representation of the input, which is paraphrased back to NL for SW9-89-001 verification, and if the input is a query, there is a translation into a query language such as SQL. SW9-89-001