Natural language processing and the automatic acquisition of knowledge

Abstract

The paper presents the general design and the first results of a research project whose long term goal is to develop and implement ALICE, an experimental system capable of augmenting its knowledge base by processing natural language texts. ALICE (an acronym for Automatic Learning and Inference Computerized Engine) is an attempt to model the cognitive processes that occur in humans when they learn a series of descriptive texts and reason about what they have learned. In the paper a general overview of the system is given with the description of its specifics, basic methodologies, and general architecture. How parsing is performed in ALICE is illustrated by following the analysis of a sample text.