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<Paper uid="A83-1005">
  <Title>IR-NLI : AN EXPERT NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE TO ONLINE DATA BASES (o)</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="31" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
II NATURAL LANGUAGE UIi~ERST?S4DING .~ND REASONI:~G
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Research in natural langage precessin 6 has recome in the last years a highly multiiisciplinzry topic, in which artificial inteliigence, computational linguistic, cognitive science, psycholo~- , ~nz logic share a wide set of common intrests, in tnia frame, reasoning i~ not a new issue. The meaning that we attach to this term in the zontex~ ~f this \[~ R+-~o with : Milan Polytechnic Artificial Intelligence Project, Milano, Italy. ' ~ ~iso with : CISM, International Center for Mechanical Sciences, Udine, Italy.  work is, nevertheless original. We distinguish in the natural language comprehension activity between a surface comprehension that only aims at representing the literal content of a natural language ex pression into a formal internal representation, and a leap comprehension that moves beyond surface meaning to capture the goals ~nd intentions which lie behind the utterance (Grosz,1979; Hobbs,1979; Allen, ?errault,1980). The process that brings from surface to deep comprehension is just what we name here reasonin~ activity. Differntly from Winograd (1980), reasoning is not , in our model, something that takes place after understanding is completed and aims at developing deductions on facts ~nd concepts %cquired. Reasoning is a basic paz~c of deep comprehension and involves not only linguistic capabilities ~understanding and dialogue) but also deduc tion, induction, analogy, generalization, etc., on common sense and domain specific knowledge. Figure presents a graphic representation of the basic relationships betwe=n understanding and reasoning, and clearly shows how reasoning moves the internal representation of an utterance from a first point, zorresponding to surface eoprehension, to a second Dne that represents ~eep comprehension.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> in the application of online information retrieval that we face in this work,the above concepts are :~nsi!ered in the fr%me of man-machine commLLnica :ion, and reasoning will mostly be concerned with terrsinolo~j, as we shall further explore in the next section.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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