Realization of natural language interfaces using lazy functional programming

Abstract

The construction of natural language interfaces to computers continues to be a major challenge. The need for such interfaces is growing now that speech recognition technology is becoming more readily available, and people cannot speak those computer-oriented formal languages that are frequently used to interact with computer applications. Much of the research related to the design and implementation of natural language interfaces has involved the use of high-level declarative programming languages. This is to be expected as the task is extremely difficult, involving syntactic and semantic analysis of potentially ambiguous input. The use of LISP and Prolog in this area is well documented. However, research involving the relatively new lazy functional programming paradigm is less well known. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of that research.