System HANSA

The system HANSA (=<u>H</u>amburger <u>An</u>alyse von <u>Sa</u>chverhalten) is the first stage of a natural language interface system for the input of data into a DBMS. The system designed and implemented so far (as a Ph.D. project under the supervision of Prof. Dr. W. Brauer) accepts German sentences with a very limited syntax, mainly because the implementation is not focussed on a syntactic parser but on a purely semantic one. Sentences are expected to express facts (describing realworld situations) and not opinions. These facts are mapped by the system into a semantic net, representing the model of a part of the real world. The procedures that accomplish this analysis are designed to be independent of a specific task domain. Thus the system can equally well handle sentences of the above mentioned type and sentences on a meta-level that express facts about the system's own net, enabling the user to modify the basic knowledge of HANSA in a simple and straightforward way.