Abstract: This is the first experiment of a Chinese language understanding systemconstructed on the principle of semantic network. The model simulates a dialogbetween a pupil and a teacher on the common sense about animals. This system has limited abilities of reasoning, including induction,making inferences from partial information and from indirect information sothat the machine is capable of answering questions which could not beanswered depending only upon its knowledge base. Owing to the fact that word order is an important characteristic ofChinese language, our system, in understanding questions and making answers,adopted "word order analysis" instead of "case analysis" which is used by P.H. Lindsay and P. A. Norman, R. H. Simmons and others. The program is run on a China-made computer TQ16, supported by BCYprogramming language, and about 200 Chinese characters written in alphabeticway have been used for the input and output of the experiment.

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