This research investigates natural language comprehension by computer systems. Specific targets are to: 1) Describe how the ambiguity of words used in natural language may be resolved from context and "semantic relations" - the underlying structures connecting the possible alternative meanings of words. 2) Develop a computer system, meta5, which automatically carries out natural language processing, using the semantic relations approach. A key feature of this development is the use of parallel processing, with many computing elements operating simultaneously to analyse the natural language input. The significance of this research is that natural language processing systems, for machine translation, user interfaces, and knowledge based systems, must overcome the fundamental problem that ordinary words have many meanings, and the right one must be found for each occurrence. The processing requirements of this task make it essential to explore parallel processing and other means of greatly increasing the computing power brought to bear on the problem.
