From specialized syntax to general logic: The case of comparatives

Abstract

General-purpose reasoning based on knowledge encoded in natural language, requires mapping this knowledge out of its syntax-dependent form into a more general representation that can be more flexibly applied and manipulated. We have created a system that accomplishes this in a variety of cases via mapping English syntactic expressions into predicate and term logic expressions, which can then be cognitively manipulated by tools such as a probabilistic logic engine, an information-theoretic pattern miner and others. Here we illustrate the functionality of this system in the particular case of comparative constructions.