Relating Templates to Language and Logic

Abstract

Syntactic theories relate sentence structure to the details of morphemes, inflections, and word order. Semantic theories relate sentences to the details of formal logic and model theory. But many of the most successful programs for information extraction (IE) are based on domain-dependent templates that ignore the details at the center of attention of the major theories of syntax and semantics. This paper shows that it is possible to find a more primitive set of operations, called the canonical formation rules, which underlie both the template-filling operations of IE and the more formal operations of parsers and theorem provers. These rules are first stated in terms of conceptual graphs and then generalized to any knowledge representation, including predicate calculus, frames, and the IE templates. As a result, the template-filling operations of IE become part of a more general set of operations that can be used in various combinations to process knowledge of any kind,KeywordsKnowledge RepresentationParse TreeDouble NegationCharacter StringGeneralization RuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.