Tech Report CS-90-13

A Probabilistic Approach to Text Understanding

Robert P. Goldman and Eugene Charniak

May 1990

Abstract:

We discuss a new framework for text understanding. Three major design decisions characterize this approach. First, we take the problem of text understanding to be a particular case of the general problem of abductive inference: reasoning from effects to causes. Second, we use probability theory to handle the uncertainty that arises in abductive inference in general and natural language understanding in particular. Finally, we treat all aspects of the text-understanding problem in a unified way. All aspects of natural language processing are treated in the same framework, allowing us to integrate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints. In order to apply probability theory to this problem, we have developed a probabilistic model of text understanding. To make it practical to use this model, we have devised a way of incrementally constructing and evaluating belief networks that is applicable to other abduction problems. We have written a program, Wimp3, to experiment with this framework.

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