Executable specifications of natural-language speech applications

如果有更多的理论和开放源码工具可供非专家用来建立和部署自然语言语音应用程序，计算机和万维网的功能将得到显著改善。这不仅将使视力、认知或运动障碍的人受益，还将使需要免提访问的用户受益。本研究的目的是1)研究自然语言的各种语义理论，并开发有助于构建到数据库和网络上的其他知识来源的高效用户友好的自然语言接口的组合语义学；2)开发理论和工具，允许几乎不了解解析技术的程序员创建自然语言处理器，作为定义要处理的语言的句法和语义的属性语法的可执行规范；以及3)创建工具，促进超链接的自然语言语音应用的部署，公众可以使用免费可用的语音浏览器和常用的通信协议来访问所述自然语言应用。

The functionality of computers and the world wide web would be significantly improved if there were more theories and open-source tools that could be used by non-experts to build and deploy natural-language speech applications. Not only would this benefit people with visual, cognitive, or motor disabilities, it would also benefit users who require hands-free access. The objective of this research is 1) to investigate various semantic theories of natural-language and to develop a compositional semantics that will facilitate the construction of efficient user-friendly natural-language interfaces to databases and other sources of knowledge on the web, 2) to develop theory and tools which will allow natural-language processors to be created by programmers with little knowledge of parsing technology, as executable specifications of attribute grammars which define the syntax and the semantics of the language to be processed, and 3) to create tools that will facilitate the deployment of hyperlinked natural-language speech applications that can be accessed by the public using freely-available speech browsers and commonly-used communication protocols.