Rapid text-based authoring of defeasible higher-order logic formulas, via textual logic and rulelog (summary of invited talk)

Abstract

We present textual logic (TL), a novel approach that enables rapid semi-automatic acquisition of rich logical knowledge from text. The resulting axioms are expressed as defeasible higher-order logic formulas in Rulelog, a novel extended form of declarative logic programs. A key element of TL is textual terminology, a phrasal style of knowledge in which words/word-senses are used directly as logical constants. Another key element of TL is a method for rapid interactive disambiguation as part of logic-based text interpretation. Existential quantifiers are frequently required, and we describe Rulelog's approach to making existential knowledge be defeasible. We describe results from a pilot experiment that represented the knowledge from several thousand English sentences in the domain of college-level cell biology, for purposes of question-answering. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.