Introduction

This manual is meant to complement and clarify the UNL Specifications. To achieve this goal, it uses a variety of examples to explain how each component, i.e. a relation or an attribute, should be used, and how the UNL expressions should be for expressing various meanings, from grammatical viewpoints of natural language. Several examples from various languages are used to clarify concepts.

We suppose that the readers of this manual are already familiarized with the UNL terminology and definitions. Therefore, we recommend you to read the UNL Specification beforehand.

This manual consists of the following several chapters. Chapter 1 shows the structure of UNL, how each kind of information in a sentence of natural language is dealt with is explained. Chapter 2 explains what kinds of UWs are used in the UNL expressions of a sentence. Chapter 3 shows the descriptions of UNL expression, how the UNL expressions should be for representing a sentence or a hyper graph structure of UNL. Relations are explained in chapter 4, a comparison with closer relations is made in order to help to make clear the use of each relation. Attributes are explained in chapter 5, focusing on what kinds of attributes exist and how they are used for different languages. The last chapter explains how to deal with various meanings or expressions of natural language from syntactic and semantic point of view when expressing them in UNL. 

Although we tried to use as many as possible restricted UWs in the examples of this manual, many Basic UWs still remained due to the time constrictions.  Since the purpose of this manual is showing solutions or examples of various cases, we believe that the UNL structures showed in this manual will help you to understand the UNL well.  However, we will change all UWs to restricted one in near future.

We expect that the writers of enconvserion or deconversion, UNL or related system developers, or UNL document editors to be the readers of this manual. We believe that this manual will be useful and helpful in making and understanding the UNL, avoiding structural mistakes and geting stable expressions of UNL.

We tried to make this manual easy to use. As a result, explanations of UNL expressions can be easily referred to from syntactic and pragmatic point of view, and examples of UNL and native languages can be easily referred to from corresponding components or vocabularies of UNL.

Meiying Zhu
zhu@undl.org