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Natural Logic for Textual Inference

Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning (2007)

Introduction

This paper deals with “natural logic” which is a system of logical inference that operates over natural language. Usually the approaches for natural language inference are either robust but shallow or deep but brittle. The system proposed in this paper aims to be in the middle of the existent approaches and avoids, for instance, the error when translating a natural language to first-order logic.

One key concept in the theory of natural logic is “monotonicity” in which, instead of using quantifiers, the concepts or constraints expressed in a sentence are expanded or contracted. This way, linguistics expressions can be represented as upward-monotone, downward monotone, or non-monotone semantic functions.

The developed system is called NatLog and has an architecture with three main stages:

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Written by Ximena Gutiérrez.