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A Natural Formalized Proof Language

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Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14777))

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Abstract

Artificial intelligence assisted mathematical proof has become a highly focused area nowadays. One key problem in this field is to generate formal mathematical proofs from natural language proofs. Due to historical reasons, the formal proof languages adopted by traditional theorem provers were not intended to represent natural language proofs. Therefore, they are not well-suited for the aforementioned tasks and proof-checking work for educational purposes. In this paper, we design a proof language and its corresponding abstract syntax tree and implement a proof checking tool for it. This language can be easily converted from natural language, thus providing a rich corpus of formal proof. Additionally, it supports the handling of issues in informal proofs through static analysis, and enhances the expressive power of the language by introducing the structure of partial proofs. This design combines the expressiveness of natural language and the accuracy of formal language, resulting in an improved mathematical proof language.

L. Xie and Z. Hui—contributed equally to this work.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by NSF China 92370201.

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Correspondence to Qinxiang Cao .

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Xie, L., Hui, Z., Cao, Q. (2024). A Natural Formalized Proof Language. In: Chin, WN., Xu, Z. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering. TASE 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14777. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64626-3_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64626-3_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-64625-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-64626-3

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