NL as Encryption for Meaning and its Uses for InfoSec

Feb 28, 2001

Abstract

Natural language (NL) can be considered an encryption system for meaning. In cooperation with Victor Raskin and Mikhail Atalla we are exploring how to harness the power of natural language processing for security applications. Our initial joint paper is about to be published in NSPW 2000 Proceedings.

As a background to using analysis and manipulation of meaning in NL, I will introduce the field of ontological semantics that is concerned with extracting, representing and manipulating meaning of natural language texts. In particular, I will introduce the static knowledge sources used by ontological semantics - the ontology, or world model, the lexicon, the fact database and the text meaning representation (TMR). I will then sketch the process of extracting meaning from natural language texts and will discuss the complexity of this process and the reasons for relatively slow progress in the field of automatic analysis of meaning.