Temporal semantics and natural language processing in a decision support system

摘要

This paper is an attempt to address in an integrated fashion three issues of interest in the decision support system (DSS) context. First, to deal with dynamic problem environments, a mechanism is proposed to represent data and decision models with explicit temporal aspects. Second, in order to provide a natural language interface to such a DSS, this representation of temporal knowledge is used to process queries including those with explicit temporal aspects. Third, the issue of computational efficiency has been addressed using the language of equational logic as a deduction oriented language for problem solving as well as describing environmental knowledge. An example describing the salient features of the system is presented.