This research is joint work of Sergei Nirenburg at Carnegie Mellon University and Victor Raskin at Purdue University. Their goal is to advance the state of the art in knowledge bases for natural language processing. They are building knowledge bases about words, word meanings and word relationships, extended beyond "toy" domains to be comprehensive enough for natural language processing in realistic situations. These kinds of "computational lexicography" knowledge bases are fundamental to automatic computer systems for analyzing natural language and for generating natural language output. The significance of this research is that automatic processing of natural language is a major component in developing computer systems interface. Computerized knowledge bases about word meanings and world knowledge are indispensable to natural language processing systems. This work begins to build the framework for such knowledge bases and the tools for acquiring their content, in a way which will be useful to many research groups and suitable for diverse applications.
