ColloquiaVasile Rus Talk 4/7/03

[Meridel Trimble]

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TOYOTA TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 
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Date: Monday, April 7th, 2003

Time: 2:30 p.m. 

Place: Ryerson Hall 251 

Speaker: Vasile Rus
Southern Methodist University

Title: Logic Form and Its Application to Question Answering

Abstract: 
Automated reasoning is one of the most challenges issues in Artificial
Intelligence. We present here a computational representation, called the
logic form (LF), that enables automated reasoning on English texts. LF is
simple, first order logic and embeds lexical, syntactic and semantic
information.

We show a frequency-based method for deriving logic forms and address
the issues of part of speech tagging and syntactic parsing since our
approach relies on the structural information embedded in a syntactic
parse tree.

In addition we present how to boost the performance of a state of the art
Question Answering system using logic forms and world knowledge from
concept definitions in WordNet, a lexical database of English. First,
concept definitions are transformed in LF and further into axioms. Then,
from a set of candidate answers we try to identify the correct answer
using unification and a set of inference rules based on semantic
relations in WordNet.

We conclude by having a discussion about the advantages of concept-based
knowledge representation versus predicate-based knowledge representation.
*Refreshments will be served after the talk in Ryerson 255* 

If you wish to meet with the speaker, please send e-mail to Meridel Trimble 
mtrimble at uchicago.edu