Verbs as Predicates: Towards Inference in a Discourse
Zuzana Nevěřilová, Marek Grác · RASLAN · 2011
Generally, it is usual that communication partners mention only facts that are not believed to be known to both parties of the communication. This shared implicit knowledge is also known as common sense knowledge. Because of not mentioning everything important it is difficult (if not impossible) to analyze a discourse for computer programs without any background knowledge. In this paper a relationship between logic and language is discussed. In NLP systems verbs are often seen as predicates and verb valencies are seen as arguments. According to this approach new sentences (propositions) can be inferred from the discourse. Second, a system for inference from verb frames was created and a evaluation proposal is described. We have picked up 174 verbs occurring in Czech cooking recipes. For these verbs 232 inference rules were manually created. The inference process was tested on a corpus of 37 thousands tokens (2 400 sentences). As the result 253 new sentences were generated.