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<Paper uid="P88-1004">
  <Title>THE INTERPRETATION OF RELATIONAL NOUNS</Title>
  <Section position="11" start_page="30" end_page="31" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 CONCLUSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Relational nouns are of primary importance for natural language interfaces to databases and expert systems, since they are commonly used to refer to database relations and to arithmetical functions. This paper has presented a treatment of relational nouns which manages to maintain uniformity and generality  at the level of syntactic analysis and initial semantic interpretation. This treatment has been incorporated into the semantic framework of BBN's Spoken Language System without writing additional LISP code. The semantic transformations necessary for the treatment are all carried out by general algorithms which were part of the pre-existing semantic framework. Implementing the treatment consisted in writing descriptive (EFL to WML) translation specifications for the EFL relations involved with function nouns, and a few dozen logical transformations to supplement the existing set of simplifications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Further work on this topic should investigate how our perspective on relational nouns carries over to an account of the temporal and spatial modifiers that can be used with any noun. This will then make it possible to explore its connections with the work on the semantics of time-dependent nouns that has been done in the Montague-tradition. \[:3\] \[13\]</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>