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LOLITA
 
 
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LOLITA is a natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
 system developed by Durham University
Durham University

Durham University is a university in Durham, England. It was founded as the University of Durham by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837....
 between 1986 and 2000. The name is an acronym for "Large-scale, Object-based, Linguistic
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 Interactor
Interactor

Interactor is a term used to describe a part of an organism with evolution selection acts upon. Interactors are the individual evolutionary paths which are subject to real-life interactions, such as phenotype and the outward traits most affected by natural selection....
, Translator
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
 and Analyzer".

LOLITA was developed by Roberto Garigliano and colleagues between 1986 and 2000. It was designed as a general-purpose tool for processing unrestricted text that could be the basis of a wide variety of applications
Application software

Application software is any tool that functions and is operated by means of a computer, with the purpose of supporting or improving the software user 's work....
. At its core was a semantic network
Semantic network

A semantic network is a network which represents semantic relations between the concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation....
 containing some 90,000 interlinked concepts.






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LOLITA is a natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
 system developed by Durham University
Durham University

Durham University is a university in Durham, England. It was founded as the University of Durham by Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837....
 between 1986 and 2000. The name is an acronym for "Large-scale, Object-based, Linguistic
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 Interactor
Interactor

Interactor is a term used to describe a part of an organism with evolution selection acts upon. Interactors are the individual evolutionary paths which are subject to real-life interactions, such as phenotype and the outward traits most affected by natural selection....
, Translator
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
 and Analyzer".

LOLITA was developed by Roberto Garigliano and colleagues between 1986 and 2000. It was designed as a general-purpose tool for processing unrestricted text that could be the basis of a wide variety of applications
Application software

Application software is any tool that functions and is operated by means of a computer, with the purpose of supporting or improving the software user 's work....
. At its core was a semantic network
Semantic network

A semantic network is a network which represents semantic relations between the concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation....
 containing some 90,000 interlinked concepts. Text could be parsed
Parsing

In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a sequence of lexical analysis#Token to determine their grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar....
 and analysed then incorporated into the semantic net, where it could be reasoned about (Long and Garigliano, 1993). Fragments of the semantic net could also be rendered back to English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 or Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
.

Several applications were built using the system, including financial information analysers and information extraction tools for Darpa’s “Message Understanding Conference
Message Understanding Conference

The Message Understanding Conferences were initiated and financed by DARPA to encouragethe development of new and better methods of information extraction....
 Competitions” (MUC-6
Message Understanding Conference

The Message Understanding Conferences were initiated and financed by DARPA to encouragethe development of new and better methods of information extraction....
 and MUC-7
Message Understanding Conference

The Message Understanding Conferences were initiated and financed by DARPA to encouragethe development of new and better methods of information extraction....
). The latter involved processing original Wall Street Journal articles, to perform tasks such as identifying key job changes in businesses and summarising articles. LOLITA was one of a small number of systems worldwide to compete in all sections of the tasks. A system description and an analysis of the MUC-6 results were written by Callaghan
Paul Callaghan

Paul Callaghan may refer to:*Paul Callaghan , Professor of Physical Sciences and Director of the MacDiarmid Institute in Wellington, New Zealand...
 (Callaghan, 1998).

LOLITA was an early example of a substantial application written in a functional language
Functional programming

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of function s and avoids program state and immutable object data....
: it consisted of around 50,000 lines of Haskell
Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, purely functional programming language with non-strict programming language, named after logician Haskell Curry. The goals of the language are described as:...
, with around 6000 lines of C
C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
. It is also a complex and demanding application, in which many aspects of Haskell were invaluable in development.

LOLITA was designed to handle unrestricted text, so that ambiguity at various levels was unavoidable and significant. Laziness
Lazy evaluation

In computer programming, lazy evaluation is the technique of delaying a computation until such time as the result of the computation is known to be needed....
 was essential in handling the explosion of syntactic
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 ambiguity resulting from a large grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
, and it was much used with semantic ambiguity too. The system used multiple "domain specific
Domain-specific programming language

In software development, a domain-specific language is a programming language or specification language dedicated to a particular problem domain, a particular problem representation technique, and/or a particular solution technique....
 embedded
Embedded system

An embedded system is a special-purpose computer system designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions, often with real-time computing constraints....
 languages
Programming language

A programming language is a machine-readable artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer....
" for semantic
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 and pragmatic processing and for generation of natural language text from the semantic net. Also important was the ability to work with complex abstractions and to prototype
Prototype

A prototype is an original type, form, or instance of something serving as a typical example, basis, or standard for other things of the same category....
 new analysis algorithms
Algorithm

In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related subjects, an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions, often used for calculation and data processing....
 quickly.

See also

  • Computational linguistics
    Computational linguistics

    Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....


External links

  • 1992
  • A collection of papers on parallelism in Haskell, Lolita frequently being one of or the primary test cases
  • -(Garagani 1997)