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<Paper uid="J81-2003">
  <Title>The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL System</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="ackno">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Problems
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In conclusion, some of the problems of this interpretation must be pointed out. If there are relations POSSESS or OWN in the data base, HAVE sentences could be meant to refer to these relations. But there is no mechanism that automatically would look for such relations and either access them directly or resort to them if the standard interpretation fails. A solution to this problem is for the user to define HAVE as a synonym for POSSESS. He can then delete the system-defined HAVE altogether, if he is sure to use HAVE only in the sense of OWN. But he will probably want his definition in addition to the system defined HAVE. This leads to two parses and interpretations. In many cases only one of them will bring resuits, but sometimes both lead to the same answer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Thus, Does John have a secretary? will be interpreted both as: Is there a secretary of John? and Does John own a secretary? where the second interpretation will fail. But the query Does John have a car? can bring answers to both interpretations, depending on the structure of the data base.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> A consequence of not having a relation HAVE on the one hand and on the other of expecting alt adverbials and prepositional phrases to refer to columns in relations causes difficulties where prepositions are used in conjunction with HAVE and also with BE, as in questions like: Where does Peter have his office? To whom is Peter married? When is Peter's birthday? Is Peter's birthday on Friday? The German equivalent of the last two questions uses the verb HAVE: Wann hat Peter Geburtstag? Hat Peter am Freitag Geburtstag? For sentences with HAVE and BE as the main verb, the adverbials and prepositional phrases which have been attached to the verb by the grammar are relocated to the noun phrase addressing the relation that contains the corresponding columns. For the examples above, this means the columns LA, P=to, and TA, respectively, in the relations OFFICE, BIRTHDAY, and MARRIED.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A serious problem for which we currently have no solution results from the fact that there is no interpretation where the accusative does not contain a relation. As can be seen from the examples, it is often intuitively clear what the interpretation of such sen118 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 2, April-June 1981 Magdalena Zoeppritz The Meaning of OF and HAVE in the USL-System tences could be. &amp;quot;The secretary who has Sauer&amp;quot; could easily be the secretary of Sauer in the context of &amp;quot;who has whom to work for&amp;quot;, but in the context of &amp;quot;who has which manager&amp;quot;, the &amp;quot;secretary who has Sauer&amp;quot; can be the one whose manager is Sauer. As was shown above, the predicate HAVE is a derived predicate, it is applicable only where a more basic association exists between the elements in question. This predicate is found explicitly expressed, where HAVE sentences are expanded by AS-complements.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Peter has a musician as secretary If there is no AS-complement and the accusative of HAVE contains a common noun, that noun generally points to the predicate; the AS-complement would be redundant.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Peter has a musician can be read as Peter has a musician as his musician But in the proper context, the base predicate can be clearly something else: In a conversation about hobbies of secretaries, the same sentence &amp;quot;Peter has a musician&amp;quot; can mean Peter has a musician as his secretary In human dialogue the general rule that the base predicate appears in the accusative noun phrase can be overridden by special contexts, but in the general case the rule holds and can be used in the framework of data base interaction. In the absence of reference to a predicate in the accusative of HAVE, the base predicate can only be deduced from the context. It can be one of the properties of the element in the accusative, e.g. Sauer's being a manager, a father, or an employer, or it can coincide with the predicate referred to by the nominative. Therefore, the attempt at interpretation of such sentences would lead to choosing among plausible alternatives, choices that would remain arbitrary even if carefully made, and the results would be unreliable. We have avoided this at the cost of not providing general interpretations for these cases, even though the individual case is often intuitively interpretable, because we feel that in the framework of data base interaction it is more important for the system to react consistently and reliably than to simulate human dialogue. null Since this paper was originally written, the USL System has moved to using System R as the data base management system, with SQL as the query language and target language for the interpretation. The PRTV-version of USL has been used by small groups in their applications, and initial results are encouraging (Lehmann et al., 1978, Krause, 1979). Further study is necessary, particularly with respect to data-base design and vocabulary definition by users.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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