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<Paper uid="P84-1082">
  <Title>AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION STRUCTURES</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we are concerned with the systematic translation of natural language discourse into Discourse Representation Structures as they are defined in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) first formulated by Kamp (1981). This theory represents a major breakthrough in that it systematically accounts for the context dependent interpretation of sentences, in particular with regard to anaphoric relations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> From a syntactic point of view, however, Kamp chose a very restricted fragment of English. It is our goal, therefore, to extend the syntactic coverage for DRT by linking it to the grammars described for the User Specialty Languages (USL) system (Lehmann (1978), Ott and Zoeppritz (1979), Lehmann (1980), Sopefia (1982), Zoeppritz (1984)) which are comprehensive enough to deal with realistic discourses. Our main tasks are then to describe the syntactic framework chosen Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) the translation from parse trees to DRSs The translation from parse trees to DRSs will, as we shall see, not proceed directly but rather via Intermediate Structures. which were already used in the USL system. Clearly, it is not possible here to describe the complete process in full detail. We will hence limit ourselves here to a presentation Kamp's fragment of English in our framework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The work reported here forms part of the development of a Natural Language Analyzer that will translate natural language discourse into DRSs and that is evolving out of the USL system. We intend to use this Natural Language Analyzer as a part of a legal expert system the construction of which is the objective of a joint project of the University of Tiibingen and the IBM Heidelberg Scientific Center.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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