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<Paper uid="P82-1035">
  <Title>Scruffy Text Understanding: Design and Implementation of 'Tolerant' Understanders</Title>
  <Section position="12" start_page="158" end_page="159" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4.0 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The ability to understand text is dependent on the ability to understand what is being described in the text. Hence, a reader of, say, English text must have applicable knowledge of both the situations that may be described in texts (e.g., actions, states, sequences of events, goals, methods of achieving goals, etc.) and the the surface structures that appear in the language, i.e., the relatlons between the surface order of appearance of words and phrases, and their correspondin~ meaning structures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  The process of text understanding is the combined applicatlon of these knowledge sources as a reader proceeds through a text. This fact becomes clearest when we investigate the understanding of texts that present particular problems to a reader. Human understanding is inherently tolerant; people are naturally able to ignore many types of errors, omissions, poor constructions, etc., and get straight to the meaning of the text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our theories have tried to take this ability into account by including knowledge and mechanisms of error noticing and correcting as implicit parts of our process models of language understanding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The NOMAD system is the latest in a line of &amp;quot;tolerant&amp;quot; language understanders, beginning with FOUL-UP, all based on the use of knowledge of syntax, semantics and pragmatics at all stages of the understanding process to cope with errors.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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