The PUNDIT natural-language processing system

The authors describe the PUNDIT (Prolog Understanding of Integrated Text) text-understanding system, which is designed to analyze and construct representations of paragraph-length text. PUNDIT is implemented in Quintus Prolog, and consists of distinct lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic components. Each component draws on one or more sets of data, including a lexicon, a broad-coverage grammar of English, semantic verb decompositions, rules mapping between syntactic and semantic constituents, and a domain model. Modularity, careful separation of declarative and procedural information, and separation of domain-specific and domain-independent information all contribute to a system which is flexible, extensible and portable. Versions of PUNDIT are now running in five domains, including four military and one medical