Abstract
A formal, computational, semantically clean representation of natural language is presented. This representation captures the fact that logical inferences in natural language crucially depend on the semantic relation of entailment between sentential constituents such as determiner, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, and verb phrases.
The representation parallels natural language in that it accounts for human intuition about entailment of sentences, it preserves its structure, it reflects the semantics of different syntactic categories, it simulates conjunction, disjunction, and negation in natural language by computable operations with provable mathematical properties, and it allows one to represent coordination on different syntactic levels.
The representation demonstrates that Boolean semantics of natural language can be successfully modeled in terms of representation and inference by knowledge representation formalisms with Boolean semantics. A novel approach to the problem of automatic inferencing in natural language is addressed. The algorithm for updating a computer knowledge base and reasoning with explicit negative, disjunctive, and conjunctive information based on computing subsumption relation between the representations of the appropriate sentential constituents is discussed with examples.
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Iwańska, L. Logical reasoning in natural language: It is all about knowledge. Mind Mach 3, 475–510 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00974107
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00974107