<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W04-0609">
  <Title>Towards Ontology-Based Natural Language Processing</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Future Operations Centre Analysis
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Laboratory (FOCAL) The Future Operations Centre Analysis Laboratory (FOCAL) is a research project whose goal is to &amp;quot;pioneer a paradigm shift in command environments through a superior use of capability and greater situation awareness&amp;quot; (FOCAL Task Plan). In part, this involves building a high-level information fusion system for the military domain (Lambert, 2003; FOCAL, 2002).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> To support this goal, the FOCAL facility was designed to experiment with innovative technologies. FOCAL contains a large-screen (150deg) semi-immersive virtual reality environment as its primary display, allowing vast quantities of information (real or virtual) to be displayed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Spoken dialogue with virtual characters known as VAs (Virtual Advisers) is one of the means of delivering information (Estival et al., 2003).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Within the FOCAL project, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) work packages are tasked with providing appropriate NLP and KR functionalities, including processing natural language queries and providing a formalisation of the domain and reasoning capabilities. These two work packages are closely related in that a natural language query is to be processed, mapped to its formal representation and answered by a reasoning subsystem, and then a natural language answer is returned to the user.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Current FOCAL work is focused on implementing a scenario, which is located within a particular military situation and describes a military domain, a limited (in space and time) region of the world, and other relevant elements of that situation. Among other things, the domain description requires dealing with geography, logistics and planning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The FOCAL architecture is agent-based and uses the CoABS (Control of Agent Based Systems) Grid as its infrastructure (Global InfoTek, 2002). The CoABS Grid was designed to allow a large number of heterogeneous procedural, object-oriented and agent-based systems to communicate. FOCAL agents process information, communicate and collaborate. Most agents are implemented in ATTITUDE and communication between agents is accomplished via string messages (Wark et al., 2004).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Humans are also involved in FOCAL, as the end users who interact with the system to perform their work and achieve their goal: successfully planning and conducting an operation. The current scenario provides a testbed for the system. Extensions of the scenario and new scenarios for different domains will ensure that FOCAL functions as expected outside of the limited domain of the current scenario.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> There are many aspects of FOCAL which are not directly related to NLP and KR activities, and which are therefore excluded from this discussion. In the rest of this paper, only aspects relevant to NLP and KR are considered.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>