Understanding Natural Language – Winograd 1972
Describes the Blockworld system. Argues for many features of modern linguistic theory including phrase and feature based syntax, a semantics based on relations, properties, events and objects. Introduces language understanding as the task of translating between a string representation of a language and a conceptual representation suitable for inference and reasoning. Recognizes the interdependence between words, their immediate constituents, local discourse context, overall discourse context and background world knowledge. Combines the tasks of parsing, interpreting and reasoning based on context simultaneously. Language is used to convey meaning for a purpose and we need systems that recognize this fact and incorporate all the sources of information we use to accomplish this task.