Integrating Special Rules Rooted in Natural Language Semantics into the System of Natural Deduction

Marie Duží, Michal Fait

2020

Abstract

The paper deals with natural language processing and question answering over large corpora of formalised natural language texts. Our background theory is the system of Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). Having a fine-grained analysis of natural language sentences in the form of TIL constructions, we apply Gentzen’s system of natural deduction to answer questions in an ‘intelligent’ way. It means that our system derives logical consequences entailed by the input sentences rather than merely searching answers by keywords. Natural language semantics is rich, and plenty of its special features must be taken into account in the process of inferring answers. The TIL system makes it possible to formalise all these semantically salient features in a fine-grained way. In particular, since TIL is a logic of partial functions, it deals with non-referring terms and sentences with truth-value gaps in an appropriate way. This is important because sentences often come attached with a presupposition that must be true in order that a given sentence had any truth-value. Yet, a problem arises how to integrate those special semantic rules into a standard deduction system. Proposal of the solution is one of the goals of this paper. The second novel result is this. There is a problem how to search relevant sentences in the labyrinth of input text data and how to vote for relevant applicable rules to meet the goal, i.e. to answer a given question. To this end, we propose a heuristic method driven by constituents of a given question.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Duží M. and Fait M. (2020). Integrating Special Rules Rooted in Natural Language Semantics into the System of Natural Deduction. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: NLPinAI, ISBN 978-989-758-395-7, pages 410-421. DOI: 10.5220/0009369604100421

in Bibtex Style

@conference{nlpinai20,
author={Marie Duží and Michal Fait},
title={Integrating Special Rules Rooted in Natural Language Semantics into the System of Natural Deduction},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: NLPinAI,},
year={2020},
pages={410-421},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009369604100421},
isbn={978-989-758-395-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: NLPinAI,
TI - Integrating Special Rules Rooted in Natural Language Semantics into the System of Natural Deduction
SN - 978-989-758-395-7
AU - Duží M.
AU - Fait M.
PY - 2020
SP - 410
EP - 421
DO - 10.5220/0009369604100421