The role of knowledge-based technology in language applications development

The automatic processing of written texts is being tackled by a variety of scientific disciplines. Within Computer Science the area of Natural Language Processing is deeply concerned with the problem of developing software systems that include language analysis functionalities to solve real problems. During the last decade the main contributions faced the problem in a more engineering way taking into account several available technologies from different areas, in order to develop a suitable framework allowing the integration of different techniques and resources required to solve natural language processing problems. Knowledge Engineering is increasingly regarded as a means to complement traditional formal models by adding symbolic modelling and inference capabilities in a way that facilitates the introduction and maintenance of linguistic experience. Also there has been an important effort in resources development, so reusability is a key question shared by Language Applications. In this paper we present a cognitive approach that allows the design of linguistic applications that integates different formalisms, reuses existing language resources and supports the implementation of the required control in a flexible way. Also several related work showing the current state of the knowledge based engineering technology is included. Finally, in order to show the suitability of knowledge-based technology in linguistic engineering, a case study dealing with the automatic generation of database conceptual models from Spanish short texts is included. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.