ABSTRACT
Knowledge was once the province of the scholar-priest. With the advent of the printing press, the printing shop and the bookstore became the sources of knowledge. One of the earliest and most famous artificial intelligence programs, ELIZA, demonstrates quite effectively how computers can be programmed to function reasonably well in small domains and yet have virtually no knowledge of natural language processing. For machines to be able to understand and produce language, they need a program called a parser, which takes an incoming string of natural language and analyses the structure to transform potentially ambiguous language into unambiguous representations that a computer can work with. A parser is essential for any natural language processing, whether input and output are via voice, a keyboard, mouse, or any other device. In the interlingua approach, the source language maps onto an abstract meaning representation of the source language, regardless of what the target language might be.
