CARAMEL: A step towards reflection in natural language understanding systems

The authors wish to extend to natural language understanding (NLU) systems a paradigm now seen as essential for AI: the use of meta-knowledge and the capability a system may have to observe its own functioning. First, they recall why multi-expert systems seem the best architecture for dealing efficiently with most NL constraints. Then they give general information about reflective reasoning models and propose some extensions to currently admitted ideas in the domain of distributed AI. Lastly, an illustration of these ideas with CARAMEL (in French: Comprehension Automatique de Recits, Apprentissage et Modelisation des Echanges Langagiers), the system developed in the group and able to perform various tasks using NLU