A n organization's most valuable knowledge -its essential intellectual capital-is not limited to ... more A n organization's most valuable knowledge -its essential intellectual capital-is not limited to the information in of cial document repositories and databases, such as scienti c formulae, ''hard'' research data, computer codes, codi ed procedures, nancial gures, customer records, and the like. It also includes the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members (see, for example, .
2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing, 2011
We present work on using a domain model to guide text interpretation, in the context of a project... more We present work on using a domain model to guide text interpretation, in the context of a project that aims to interpret English questions as a sequence of queries to be answered from structured databases. We adapt a broad-coverage and ambiguity-enabled natural language processing (NLP) system to produce domain-specific logical forms, using knowledge of the domain to zero in on the appropriate interpretation. The vocabulary of the logical forms is drawn from a domain theory that constitutes a higher-level abstraction of the contents of a set of related databases. The meanings of the terms are encoded in an axiomatic domain theory. To retrieve information from the databases, the logical forms must be instantiated by values constructed from fields in the database. The axiomatic domain theory is interpreted by the first-order theorem prover SNARK to identify the groundings, and then retrieve the values through procedural attachments semantically linked to the database. SNARK attempts to prove the logical form as a theorem by reasoning over the theory that is linked to the database and returns the exemplars of the proof(s) back to the user as answers to the query. The focus of this paper is more on the language task; however, we discuss the interaction that must occur between linguistic analysis and reasoning for an endto-end natural language interface to databases. We illustrate the process using examples drawn from an HIV treatment domain, where the underlying databases are records of temporally bound treatments of individual patients.
Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - FOIS '01, 2001
Abstract We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and... more Abstract We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and knowledge representation, with particular regard to existence entailments. First order representations with an explicit existence predicate are shown to not adequately capture the entailments of prevention statements. A linguistic analysis is framed in a higher order intensional logic, employing a Fregean notion of existence as instantiation of a concept. We discuss how this can be mapped to a Cyc style knowledge representation.
Proceedings of the 10th international workshop on qualitative reasoning about physical systems, May 1, 1996
This document describes a compositional modeling language, CML, which is a general declarative mo... more This document describes a compositional modeling language, CML, which is a general declarative modeling language for logically specifying the symbolic and mathematical properties of the structure and behavior of physical systems. CML is intended to facilitate model sharing between research groups, many of which have long been using similar languages. These languages are based primarily on the language originally defined by Qualitative Process theory [Forbus 1984] and include the languages used for the ...
A n organization's most valuable knowledge -its essential intellectual capital-is not limited to ... more A n organization's most valuable knowledge -its essential intellectual capital-is not limited to the information in of cial document repositories and databases, such as scienti c formulae, ''hard'' research data, computer codes, codi ed procedures, nancial gures, customer records, and the like. It also includes the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members (see, for example, .
2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing, 2011
We present work on using a domain model to guide text interpretation, in the context of a project... more We present work on using a domain model to guide text interpretation, in the context of a project that aims to interpret English questions as a sequence of queries to be answered from structured databases. We adapt a broad-coverage and ambiguity-enabled natural language processing (NLP) system to produce domain-specific logical forms, using knowledge of the domain to zero in on the appropriate interpretation. The vocabulary of the logical forms is drawn from a domain theory that constitutes a higher-level abstraction of the contents of a set of related databases. The meanings of the terms are encoded in an axiomatic domain theory. To retrieve information from the databases, the logical forms must be instantiated by values constructed from fields in the database. The axiomatic domain theory is interpreted by the first-order theorem prover SNARK to identify the groundings, and then retrieve the values through procedural attachments semantically linked to the database. SNARK attempts to prove the logical form as a theorem by reasoning over the theory that is linked to the database and returns the exemplars of the proof(s) back to the user as answers to the query. The focus of this paper is more on the language task; however, we discuss the interaction that must occur between linguistic analysis and reasoning for an endto-end natural language interface to databases. We illustrate the process using examples drawn from an HIV treatment domain, where the underlying databases are records of temporally bound treatments of individual patients.
Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - FOIS '01, 2001
Abstract We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and... more Abstract We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and knowledge representation, with particular regard to existence entailments. First order representations with an explicit existence predicate are shown to not adequately capture the entailments of prevention statements. A linguistic analysis is framed in a higher order intensional logic, employing a Fregean notion of existence as instantiation of a concept. We discuss how this can be mapped to a Cyc style knowledge representation.
Proceedings of the 10th international workshop on qualitative reasoning about physical systems, May 1, 1996
This document describes a compositional modeling language, CML, which is a general declarative mo... more This document describes a compositional modeling language, CML, which is a general declarative modeling language for logically specifying the symbolic and mathematical properties of the structure and behavior of physical systems. CML is intended to facilitate model sharing between research groups, many of which have long been using similar languages. These languages are based primarily on the language originally defined by Qualitative Process theory [Forbus 1984] and include the languages used for the ...
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Papers by Danny Bobrow