A Natural Language Interface for Computer-Aided Design

1. Introduction.- 1.1. The Pros and Cons of Natural Language Interfaces.- 1.2. Domanial Implications.- 1.3. Cleopatra.- 1.4. Natural Language Processing-Some Preliminaries.- 1.5. An Outline of this Thesis.- 2. Previous Approaches.- 2.1. Syntax-First approaches.- 2.2. Semantic Grammars.- 2.3. Augmented Transition Networks.- 2.4. Case-Frame Parsing.- 3. A New Approach.- 3.1. Flexibility.- 3.1.1. Two Arguments Against Semantic Features.- 3.1.2. The Representation of Constraints in Cleopatra.- 3.2. Parallelism, and Confidence Levels.- 3.2.1. Parallelism.- 3.2.2. Confidence-Levels.- 3.2.3. Updating Confidence-Levels.- 4. The Parsing Process.- 4.1. Lexical Entries.- 4.2. Dictionary Entries.- 4.3. Integration Procedures.- 4.3.1. The integration procedure for nouns.- 4.3.2. The integration procedure for tense.- 5. Filling the Blanks.- 5.1. ''Safe" Attachments.- 5.2. Relative Clauses.- 5.2.1. That Relative Clauses.- 5.2.2. Whiz-Deletion.- 5.2.3. Relative pronoun deletion.- 5.2.4. HeadlessRelative Clauses.- 5.3. Time-Adverbial Clauses.- 5.4. Conjunctions.- 5.5. Ellipses.- 5.6. Confidence-Levels Revisited.- 5.6.1. Attaching case-frames to verb-frames.- 5.6.2. Concordance of conjuncts.- 5.6.3. Substitutions in Ellipses.- 6. Some Detailed Examples.- 6.1. Example 1.- 6.2. Example 2.- 6.3. Example 3.- 7. Semantic Interpretation.- 7.1. An Outline of the Semantic Interpretation Process.- 7.2. Examples.- 7.2.1. Case-Frame Evaluations.- 7.2.2. The evaluation procedure for .- 7.2.3. The evaluation procedure for .- 8. Issues for Further Research.- 8.1. Extending Cleopatra to Other Domains.- 8.1.1. Linguistic Extensions.- 8.1.2. Portability Considerations.- 8.2. Robustness.- 8.3. Experimental Validation.- 9. Conclusion, and Afterthoughts.- 9.1. Afterthoughts.- Appendix A. A Sample Session with Cleopatra.- A.2. The Session Transcript.- Appendix B. An Exercise in Extension.- References.