The construction of natural language interfaces to computers continues to be a major challenge. The need for such interfaces is growing now that speech recognition technology is becoming more readily available, and people cannot speak those computer-oriented formal languages that are frequently used to interact with computer applications. Much of the research related to the design and implementation of natural language interfaces has involved the use of high-level declarative programming languages. This is to be expected as the task is extremely difficult, involving syntactic and semantic analysis of potentially ambiguous input. The use of LISP and Prolog in this area is well documented. However, research involving the relatively new lazy functional programming paradigm is less well known. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of that research.

We present in this paper recent progress in Sanskrit computational linguistics. We propose a solution to the tagging of verb phrases which correctly handles the non-associativity of external sandhi arising from the treatment of preverb ā. This involves a notion of phantom phoneme. We give exemples of execution of a computer tagger designed accordingly, which handles verb phrases as well as noun phrases.

Abstract. We present a general methodology for non-deterministic programming based on pure functional programming. We construct families of automata constructions which are used as finite-state process descriptions. We use as algorithmic description language Pidgin ML, a core applicative subset of Objective Caml. 1

The construction of natural-language interfaces to computers continues to be a major challenge. The need for such interfaces is growing now that speech-recognition technology is becoming morereadily available, and people cannot speak those computer-oriented formal languages that are frequently used to interact with computer applications. Much of the research related to the design and implementation of natural-language interfaces has involved the use of high-level declarative programming languages. This is to be expected as the task is extremely difficult, involving syntactic and semantic analysis of potentially-ambiguous input. The use of LISP and Prolog in this area is well documented. However, research involving the relatively-new lazy functional-programming paradigm is less well known. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of that research.