Talk title: A Logical  Language for Natural Language Processing

Speaker:   Syed S. Ali                                
           Department of Mathematical Sciences 
           http://tigger.cs.uwm.edu/~syali

Abstract:

Natural language allows a form of reasoning, that is based on syntax, 
called surface reasoning.This style of reasoning infers new statements 
from old, based on two properties: first, based on the similarity of the 
syntactic structure of the statements and, second,  on ``obvious'' 
subsumption relations between partsof the statements corresponding to 
potentially complex descriptions. For example, from 
``All people that have children are happy'' it naturally follows that 
``Every man who has a son is happy.'' People find this sort of reasoning 
understandable and useful.

To this end, my research involves investigating two basic problems:
    1. How complex natural language descriptions can be represented 
       and used for human-computer interaction,
    2. How surface reasoning can be computationally specified for
       real-world task domains.
Currently, there are two testbed applications in my work: processing and 
representing natural language for multimodal human-computer interfaces,
and information retrieval from online English texts. 

I will describe some aspects of the logical language and its
implementation in my system called ANALOG.