This paper presents a cognitively-inspired algorithm for the semantic analysis of nominal compounds by intelligent agents. The agents, modeled within the OntoAgent environment, are tasked to compute a full context-sensitive semantic interpretation of each compound using a battery of engines that rely on a high-quality computational lexicon and ontology. Rather than being treated as an isolated “task”, as in many NLP approaches, nominal compound analysis in OntoAgent represents a minimal extension to the core process of semantic analysis. We hypothesize that seeking similarities across language analysis tasks reflects the spirit of how people approach language interpretation, and that this approach will make feasible the long-term development of truly sophisticated, human-like intelligent agents. The initial evaluation of our approach to nominal compounds are fixed expressions, requiring individual semantic specification at the lexical level.

This paper describes one approach to document authoring and natural language generation being pursued by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in cooperation with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We will describe the tools provided for document authoring, including a glimpse at the underlying controlled language and the semantic representation of the textual meaning. We will also introduce The Bible Translator’s Assistant© (TBTA), which is used to elicit and enter target language data as well as perform the actual text generation process. We conclude with a discussion of the usefulness of this paradigm from a Bible translation perspective and suggest several ways in which this work will benefit the field of computational linguistics.