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<Paper uid="J81-1001">
  <Title>Determining Verb Phrase Referents in Dialogs I</Title>
  <Section position="18" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="ackno">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Future Directions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have discussed the problem of identifying the actions and events referred to by verb phrases. In particular, we have considered dialogs about an ongoing task. We have examined some of the knowledge needed for identifying the actions and have presented a strategy for finding them. This problem is of interest both because it is an important part of interpreting utterances and because it illustrates the need for combining knowledge of many types when interpreting utterances.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 1981 15 Ann E. Robinson Determining Verb Phrase Referents in Dialogs The research discussed here shows how the knowledge about language and about the domain that is currently identified and represented in a computer system can be used when interpreting verb phrases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Important extensions of this research include determining: (1) how top-down and bottom-up searching can be combined more effectively; (2) on what basis decisions can be made to stop looking for a connection between an action and a plan; (3) what extensions of this algorithm are necessary for handling dialogs in which the lack of a strong model of the task being performed results in weaker top-down constraints.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Further research on finding referents of verb phrases, building on the algorithm presented here, should contribute to solving the more general natural-language processing problems of determining what other knowledge is needed for interpreting utterances and how that knowledge can be used most effectively.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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