information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a person, place or thing, is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language, such as a feature set of demographichttp://cs.iit.edu/~culotta/pubs/culotta15predicting.pdf or psychographic attributes or both. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. The process by which a natural language statement is transformed so actions and events in it become

quantifiable Quantity or amount is a property that can exist as a multitude or magnitude, which illustrate discontinuity and continuity. Quantities can be compared in terms of "more", "less", or "equal", or by assigning a numerical value multiple of a u ...

variables is

semantic parsing Semantic parsing is the task of converting a natural language utterance to a logical form: a machine-understandable representation of its meaning. Semantic parsing can thus be understood as extracting the precise meaning of an utterance. Applicat ...

.https://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/papers/executable-cacm2016.pdf For example "John chased the duck furiously" can be transformed into something like :(Exists e)(chasing(e) & past_tense(e) & actor(e,John) & furiously(e) & patient(e,duck)). Another example would be "Sally said John is mean", which could be expressed as something like :(Exists u,v)(saying(u) & past_tense(u) & actor(u,Sally) & that(u,v) & is(v) & actor(v,John) & mean(v)). Such formal meaning representations allow one to use the tools of classical first-order predicate calculus even for statements which, due to their use of tense, modality, adverbial constructions, propositional arguments (''e.g.'' "Sally said that X"), etc., would have seemed intractable. This is an advantage because predicate calculus is better understood and simpler than the more complex alternatives (higher-order logics, modal logics, temporal logics, etc.), and there exist better automated tools (''e.g.''

automated theorem prover Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a ma ...

s and

model checker In computer science, model checking or property checking is a method for checking whether a finite-state model of a system meets a given specification (also known as correctness). This is typically associated with hardware or software system ...

s) for manipulating it. Meaning representations can be used for other purposes besides the application of first-order logic; one example is the automatic discovery of synonymous phrases.Dekang Lin and Patrick Pantel, "DIRT – Discovery of Inference Rules from Text", (2001) KDD01-Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data miningHoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos "Unsupervised Semantic Parsing" (2009) EMNLP09: Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing The meaning representations are sometimes called quasi-logical forms, and the existential variables are sometimes treated as

Skolem constant In mathematical logic, a formula of first-order logic is in Skolem normal form if it is in prenex normal form with only universal first-order quantifiers. Every first-order formula may be converted into Skolem normal form while not changing its ...

s. Not all natural language constructs admit a uniform translation to first order logic. See

donkey sentence In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy strai ...

for examples and a discussion.

References

{{Reflist Computational linguistics

See also

References