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<Paper uid="A94-1022">
  <Title>The Delphi Natural Language Understanding System</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="132" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
DATABASE \]
1 RESPONSE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> graph is passed to a quantification stage which produces a fully scoped logical form from it. The logical form is then passed to the discourse stage, which resolves pronominal references and performs other types of task-dependent constraint resolution to produce the final logical form. The final logical form is then passed to the backend translator, and then to the application system which produces the response. Several knowledge bases are employed by these analysis components, including grammar, &amp;quot;realization rules&amp;quot; and the domain model, which represents the set of classes and binary relations of the given application domain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Delphi differs from most other linguistically motivated systems in the role that is played by syntax.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The primary function of Delphi's parser and syntactic knowledge bases is not to produce a parse tree, but rather to constrain the search for an appropriate semantic graph interpretation of the utterance. Semantic graphs are produced not by rule-to-rule compositionality, but by what might be called &amp;quot;relation-to-relation&amp;quot; compositionality - the association of grammatical relations in the syntactic structure with semantic relations in the se- null mantic graph.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This more incremental view of the syntax/semantics interface has three crucial advantages. First, there is much more flexibility with respect to ordering and optionality of constituents. Second, because relation-to-relation translations are simple, the task of porting the system is greatly simplified. Third and finally, partial or fragmentary analyses can be represented, and a complete semantic graph interpretation for the utterance produced even when a complete syntactic analyses is not available.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In the remainder of the paper, we describe Delphi's main processing components, representational formalisms, and knowledge bases.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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