Logical form generation as abduction: Part I. Representation of linguistic concepts

Abstract

For some time, researchers have become increasingly aware that some aspects of natural language processing can be viewed as abductive inference. This article describes knowledge representation in dual-route parsimonious covering theory, based on an existing diagnostic abductive inference model, extended to address issues specific to logic form generation. the two routes of covering deal with syntactic and semantic aspects of language, and are integrated by attributing both syntactic and semantic facets to each “open class” concept. Such extensions reflect some fundamental differences between the two task domains. the syntactic aspect of covering is described to show the differences, and some interesting properties are established. the semantic associations are characterized in terms of how they can be used in an abductive model. A major significance of this work is that it paves the way for a nondeductive inference method for word sense disambiguation and logical form generation, exploiting the associative linguistic knowledge. This approach sharply contrasts with others, where knowledge has usually been laboriously encoded into pattern-action rules that are hard to modify. Further, this work represents yet another application for the general principle of parsimonious covering. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.