We have developed an approach to natural language processing in which the natural language processor is viewed as a knowledge-based system whose knowledge is about the meanings of the utterances of its language. The approach is orzented around the phrase rather than the word as the basic unit. We believe that this p a r a d i ~ for language processing not only extends the capabilities of other natural language systems, but handles those tasks that previous systems could perform in e more systematic and extensible manner. .
