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Natural Logic for Textual Inference

Bill MacCartney, Christopher D. Manning (2007)

Introduction

This paper deals with “natural logic” which is logical inference that operates over natural language. Usually the approaches for natural language inference are whether robust but shallow or deep but brittle. The system proposed in this paper aims to be in the middle of the existent approaches and avoid, for instance, the error when translating a natural language to 1st order logic.

One key concept in the theory of natural logic is “monoticity” 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: Linguistic preprocessing (parse input sentences, monotonicity marking) Alignment (alignment between the premise and the hypothesis with atomic edits) and Entailment classification (entailment relation for each edit based solely on lexical features, independent of context).

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Written by Ximena Gutiérrez.


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