We are working on algorithms to read pieces of English (word,
sentence, turn, paragraph).

(A turn is one person's reply in a dialogue--anything from one word to
many paragraphs.)

What does it mean to 'read' something?
- List words?
- Sentence structure?
- Meaning?


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One of the things that makes this hard is that English is
ambiguous, i.e. one sentence can have many meanings.

Example: I MADE HER DUCK.

a) I cooked waterfowl for her.

b) I cooked waterfowl belonging to her.

c) I created the (toy or sculpture?) duck she owns.

d) I caused her to quickly lower her head or body.

e) I turned her into waterfowl (using my magic wand?).


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Defeasibility:
 
1) We elected John president.

2) We elected John president but he never took office.


What is the default meaning of 1)?

When 1) is a substring of 2), how is it different?

- Relationship to world knowledge


What is the structure of the input anyway?
- Just a list of words?
- More than that?


- Part-of-speech (POS) disambiguation

- Word sense disambiguation