Article

Free access

Interpretation as abduction

Authors:

Jerry R. Hobbs,

Douglas EdwardsAuthors Info & Claims

ACL '88: Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

Pages 95 - 103

https://doi.org/10.3115/982023.982035

Published: 07 June 1988 Publication History

Abstract

An approach to abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project has resulted in a dramatic simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. Its use in solving the local pragmatics problems of reference, compound nominals, syntactic ambiguity, and metonymy is described and illustrated. It also suggests an elegant and thorough integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

References

[1]

Bear, John, and Jerry R. Hobbs, 1988. "Localizing the Expression of Ambiguity", Proceedings, Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Austin, Texas, February, 1988.

Digital Library

[2]

Charniak, Eugene, 1986. "A Neat Theory of Marker Passing", Proceedings, AAAI-86, Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pp. 584--588.

[3]

Clark, Herbert, 1975. "Bridging". In R. Schank and B. Nash-Webber (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, pp. 169--174. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Digital Library

[4]

Cox, P. T., and T. Pietrzykowski, 1986. "Causes for Events: Their Computation and Applications", Proceedings, CADE-8.

Digital Library

[5]

Downing, Pamela, 1977. "On the Creation and Use of English Compound Nouns", Language, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 810--842.

[6]

Hobbs, Jerry R., 1983. "An Improper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English", Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 57--63. Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1983.

Digital Library

[7]

Hobbs, Jerry R. 1985a. "Ontological promiscuity." Proceedings, 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 61--69.

Digital Library

[8]

Hobbs, Jerry R., 1985b, "The Logical Notation: Ontological Promiscuity", manuscript.

[9]

Hobbs, Jerry (1986) "Overview of the TACITUS Project", CL, Vol. 12, No. 3.

Digital Library

[10]

Hobbs, Jerry R., William Croft, Todd Davies, Douglas Edwards, and Kenneth Laws, 1986. "Commonsense Metaphysics and Lexical Semantics", Proceedings, 24th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, New York, June 1986., pp. 231--240.

Digital Library

[11]

Hobbs, Jerry R., and Paul Martin 1987. "Local Pragmatics". Proceedings, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 520--523. Milano, Italy, August 1987.

[12]

Joos, Martin, 1972. "Semantic Axiom Number One", Language, pp. 257--265.

[13]

Kowalski, Robert, 1980. The Logic of Problem Sohing, North Holland, New York.

[14]

Levi, Judith, 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals, Academic Press, New York.

[15]

Norvig, Peter, 1987. "Inference in Text Understanding", Proceedings, AAAI-87, Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, Washington, July 1987.

[16]

Nunberg, Geoffery, 1978. "The Pragmatics of Reference", Ph.D. thesis, City University of New York, New York.

[17]

Pereira, Fernando C. N., and Martha E. Pollack, 1988. "An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation", to appear in Proceedings, 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, New York, June 1988.

Digital Library

[18]

Pereira, Fernando C. N., and David H. D. Warren, 1983. "Parsing as Deduction", Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 137--144. Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1983.

Digital Library

[19]

Pople, Harry E., Jr., 1973, "On the Mechanization of Abductive Logic", Proceedings, Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 147--152, Stanford, California, August 1973.

[20]

Stickel, Mark E., 1982. "A Nonclausal Connection-Graph Theorem-Proving Program", Proceedings, AAAI-82 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pp. 229-233.

[21]

Stickel, Mark E., 1988. "A Prolog-like Inference System for Computing Minimum-Cost Abductive Explanations in Natural-Language Interpretation", forthcoming.

[22]

Thagard, Paul R., 1978. "The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice", The Journal of Philosophy, pp. 76--92.

[23]

Wilks, Yorick, 1972. Grammar, Meaning, and the Machine Analysis of Language, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Cited By

Motoura SHoshino AHosomi ISadamasa K(2023)A Logical Framework for User-Feedback Dialogues on Hypotheses in Weighted AbductionSymbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty10.1007/978-3-031-45608-4_4(40-53)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
Sukthankar GGeib CBui HPynadath DGoldman R(2014)Plan, Activity, and Intent RecognitionundefinedOnline publication date: 10-Mar-2014
Espinosa SKaya AMöller R(2011)Logical formalization of multimedia interpretationKnowledge-driven multimedia information extraction and ontology evolution10.5555/2001069.2001074(110-133)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011
Show More Cited By

Interpretation as abduction

Recommendations

Incremental interpretation of Categorial Grammar
EACL '95: Proceedings of the seventh conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The paper describes a parser for Categorial Grammar which provides fully word by word incremental interpretation. The parser does not require fragments of sentences to form constituents, and thereby avoids problems of spurious ambiguity. The paper ...
Abstract Interpretation of Indexed Grammars
Static Analysis
Abstract
Indexed grammars are a generalization of context-free grammars and recognize a proper subset of context-sensitive languages. The class of languages recognized by indexed grammars are called indexed languages and they correspond to the languages ...
Dynamics, dependency grammar and incremental interpretation
COLING '92: Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 4

The paper describes two equivalent grammatical formalisms. The first is a lexicalised version of dependeney grammar, and this can be used to provide tree-structured analyses of sentences (though some-what flatter than those usually provided by phrase ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image DL Hosted proceedings

ACL '88: Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

June 1988

304 pages

Program Chair:
Jerry Hobbs
SRI International

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

Publication History

Published: 07 June 1988

Qualifiers

Article

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 85 of 443 submissions, 19%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

59
Total Citations
View Citations
1,344
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)78
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8

Reflects downloads up to 06 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Motoura SHoshino AHosomi ISadamasa K(2023)A Logical Framework for User-Feedback Dialogues on Hypotheses in Weighted AbductionSymbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty10.1007/978-3-031-45608-4_4(40-53)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2023
Sukthankar GGeib CBui HPynadath DGoldman R(2014)Plan, Activity, and Intent RecognitionundefinedOnline publication date: 10-Mar-2014
Espinosa SKaya AMöller R(2011)Logical formalization of multimedia interpretationKnowledge-driven multimedia information extraction and ontology evolution10.5555/2001069.2001074(110-133)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2011
Kimura YNakamura MShimazu A(2009)Treatment of Legal Sentences Including Itemized and Referential Expressions --- Towards Translation into Logical FormsNew Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-642-00609-8_21(242-253)Online publication date: 6-Apr-2009
Connell JLivingston K(2008)Four Paths to AIProceedings of the 2008 conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference10.5555/1566174.1566211(394-398)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2008
Wagner TBogon TElfers C(2008)Incremental Generation of Abductive Explanations for Tactical BehaviorRoboCup 2007: Robot Soccer World Cup XI10.1007/978-3-540-68847-1_41(401-408)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2008
Nakamura MNobuoka SShimazu A(2007)Towards translation of legal sentences into logical formsProceedings of the 2007 conference on New frontiers in artificial intelligence10.5555/1788314.1788352(349-362)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2007
MacCartney BGrenager Tde Marneffe MCer DManning CMoore R(2006)Learning to recognize features of valid textual entailmentsProceedings of the main conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics10.3115/1220835.1220841(41-48)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2006
Zhuge HLuo X(2006)Automatic generation of document semantics for the e-science Knowledge GridJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2005.08.02279:7(969-983)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2006
Yeh PPorter BBarker KClark PSchreiber G(2005)Matching utterances to rich knowledge structures to acquire a model of the speaker's goalProceedings of the 3rd international conference on Knowledge capture10.1145/1088622.1088646(129-136)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2005
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents