Understanding the unknown: Unattested input processing in natural language

Abstract

This paper describes the process of deriving the meaning of an unknown word within the framework of meaning based natural language processing. It uses the clues supplied by the rest of the sentence, taking into account various degrees of possibilities of what the unknown word can mean, according to the previously acquired knowledge resources. The process of finding the meaning is incremental, and thus the derived meaning can evolve as more knowledge is gathered. The paper describes the fuzzy approach to the problem within this framework with regard to the semantic and syntactic acceptability of a sentence.