Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we investigate the interaction between linguistic and ncn-linguistic processes by considering the role of functional reasoning in understanding design specifications written in natural language. W e desaibe KA , an experimental modelbased interpretation and design system which understands English language descriptions of the design problems it solves, and examine whether KA's problem-solving amiabilities help i) ascertain the relevance of ambiguous design ^lecifications and ii) identify unspecified relations between design requirements. Our results demonstrate that augmenting language processing with the ability to reason about function along the lines suggested in K A provides effective solutions to these problems in particular as well as to other problems in natural language understanding.