1. Introduction. - 1. 1. The Pros and Cons of Natural Language Interfaces. - 1. 2. Domanial Implications. - 1. 3. Cleopatra. - 1. 4. Natural Language ProcessingSome Preliminaries. - 1. 5. An Outline of this Thesis. - 2. Previous Approaches. - 2. 1. Syntax-First approaches. - 2. 2. Semantic Grammars. - 2. 3. Augmented Transition Networks. - 2. 4. Case-Frame Parsing. - 3. A New Approach. - 3. 1. Flexibility. - 3. 2. Parallelism and Confidence Levels. - 4. The Parsing Process. - 4. 1. Lexical Entries. - 4. 2. Dictionary Entries. - 4. 3. Integration Procedures. - 5. Filling the Blanks. - 5. 1. Safe Attachments. - 5. 2. Relative Clauses. - 5. 3. Time-Adverbial Clauses. - 5. 4. Conjunctions. - 5. 5. Ellipses. - 5. 6. Confidence-Levels Revisited. - 6. Some Detailed Examples. - 6. 1. Example 1. - 6. 2. Example 2. - 6. 3. Example 3. - 7. Semantic Interpretation. - 7. 1. An Outline of the Semantic Interpretation Process. - 7. 2. Examples. - 8. Issues for Further Research. - 8. 1. Extending Cleopatra to Other Domains. - 8. 2. Robustness. - 8. 3. Experimental Validation. - 9. Conclusion and Afterthoughts. - 9. 1. Afterthoughts. - Appendix A. A Sample Session with Cleopatra. - A. 2. The Session Transcript. - Appendix B. An Exercise in Extension. - References. Language: English