Tools for Visualizing Logical Schemes among Sentences on Similarity

Abstract

The authors have been developing tools for identifying logical structure of a sentence in a document to assist readers in comprehending contexts. The sentence including logical relation “implication (→)” is the key to understand contexts of the document, because the sentence containing “implication” are regarded as statements making major claims and inferences in the document. While the key sentence are the most important to understand the contexts, the claims and inferences also require a number of statements describing “premises”, “constraints” and “rationales”, to reinforce their reasoning. These subordinate sentences should be deployed in the same or nearby paragraphs, where the key sentence is involved, to achieve high readability. In this study, the tools for visualizing logical schemes among sentences on their similarities were designed to provide a rough sketch of logical structures of the paragraph to readers. The tools were applied both to visualizing a system specification document and a detective story for evaluation. Through the applications, we confirmed that the tools succeeded in visualizing the logical schemes of the paragraph accurately and providing a perspicuous sketch of the paragraphs to readers.