[Colloquium] Reminder--Talk by Vasile Rus today

[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

http://engr.smu.edu/~vasile/research.html

Title: Logic Form and Its Application to Question Answering

Abstract: 
Automated reasoning is one of the most challenging 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 formation 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*