In Pursuit of Decidable 'Logical Form'
Michael Minock · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2014
Natural language interfaces commonly map to some type of logical form that represents the meaning of the user’s utterance. It is rare however, that this logical form is bona fide logic (e.g. expressions that may be tested for satisfiability, etc.). We explore an approach that limits logical form to decidable logics and exploits this property by deeply integrating theorm proving into analysis, pragmatics, reasoning and generation. We explore this in the context of providing natural language interfaces to databases. While support for queries beyond first-order is a requirement (e.g. queries computing average values), we isolate these non-first-order constructs via markers, flagging sub-expressions for special treatment within the non-linguistic reasoning component. We shall demonstrate our approach and its merits at SLTC and report on several threads of ongoing work to extend our approach.