Inspire: Interpreting Natural Language using Answer Set Programming, Inconsistency Management, and Relevance Theory


In the Inspire project we studied methods of Answer Set Programming on applications that are related with Interpreting Natural Language.

Key Facts:

Principal Investigator (Project Manager): Peter Schüller
Duration: April 2015 to September 2017
Funding: Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) Program 3501
English Title: Interpreting Natural Language using Answer Set Programming, Inconsistency Management, and Relevance Theory
Turkish Title: Çözüm Kümesi Programlaması, Tutarsızlık Yönetimi, ve Bağıntı Kuramıyla Doğal Dilin Yorumlaması

Project Overview:

Natural language is a very efficient form of communication: humans leave out many details when they use language because other humans can easily fill these details. As an example, ‘morning coffee’ means ‘coffee drunk in the morning’ while ‘morning newspaper’ means ‘newspaper read in the morning’, and humans understand that without effort although neither ‘drunk’ nor ‘read’ is visible in the text. This underspecification, often combined with a high ambiguity of natural language, is a big challenge for NLU systems. The Inspire project aims to advance scientific methods that allow computers to interpret natural language text with the goal of recovering its intended meaning.

An existing approach in that direction is the usage of background knowledge bases (WordNet, FrameNet) together with abductive reasoning. The idea of abduction is to find the best explanation for a given observed text input. In this project we want to build an improved NLU formalism based on Answer Set Programming (ASP).

ASP is a general purpose logic programming formalism that supports comfortable representation of knowledge and nonmonotonic reasoning (such as abduction). In an ASP program we describe a set of potential solutions and relationships/constraints between concepts. Based on such a representation, an ASP solver (a software tool) computes solutions that respect all specified relationships and constraints. ASP can handle circular knowledge without problems and allows for an efficient integration of external knowledge such as WordNet and FrameNet.

The project has been concluded successfully in 2017.

Results:

J  Journal Article  C  Conference Paper  E  Editorship  O  Other  

Publications 2019:

J , , and . Applications of Non-monotonic Reasoning to Automotive Product Configuration using Answer Set Programming. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing 30 (3), pages 1407-1422, , DOI: 10.1007/s10845-017-1333-3. [  ] [  ]

Publications 2018:

J  and . Best-Effort Inductive Logic Programming via Fine-grained Cost-based Hypothesis Generation. Machine Learning 107 (7), pages 1141-1169, , DOI: 10.1007/s10994-018-5708-2. [  ]

J . Answer Set Programming applied to Coreference Resolution and Semantic Similarity. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz 32 (2), pages 207-208, , DOI: 10.1007/s13218-018-0539-7. [  ]

J . Adjudication of Coreference Annotations via Answer Set Optimization. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 30 (4), pages 525-546, , DOI: 10.1080/0952813X.2018.1456793. [  ]

Publications 2017:

J , , , and . Constraints, Lazy Constraints, or Propagators in ASP Solving: An Empirical Analysis. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 17 (5-6), pages 780-799, , Presented at ICLP 2017, DOI: 10.1017/S1471068417000254. [  ] [  ]

C , , , , and . Answer Set Programming with External Sources. In: Reasoning Web International Summer School 10370 LNCS, pages 204-275, , DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61033-7_7. [  ]

C . Adjudication of Coreference Annotations via Answer Set Optimization. In: Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR), volume 10377 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 343-357, , Best Application Paper, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61660-5_31.

O . Learning Logic Rules from Text using Statistical Methods for Natural Lan guage Processing. PhD Thesis, Sabanci University, . [  ]

J , , and . Improving Scalability of Inductive Logic Programming via Pruning and Best-Effort Optimisation. Expert Systems With Applications 87, pages 291-303, , DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2017.06.013. [  ] [  ]

O . Inspire at Inductive Logic Programming Competition: Fine-grained Cost-based Hypothesis Generation. , Short technical note. [  ]

Publications 2016:

J . Modeling Variations of First-Order Horn Abduction in Answer Set Programming. Fundamenta Informaticae 149 (1-2), pages 159-207, , Available as arXiv:1512.08899 [cs.AI], DOI: 10.3233/FI-2016-1446. [  ] [  ]

C , , and . External Propagators in WASP: Preliminary Report . In: International Workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Solving Problems with Combinatorial Explosion (RCRA), volume 1745 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 1-9, . [  ]

C , , and . ASP for Abduction in Natural Language Understanding made more efficient using External Propagators. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Logic Programming with Constraints for Language Processing (CSLP), pages 19-21, . [  ] [  ]

C  and . Inspire at SemEval 2016 Task 2: Interpretable Semantic Textual Similarity Alignment based on Answer Set Programming. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2016), pages 1109-1115, . [  ]

C , , , , and . SteM at SemEval-2016 Task 4A: Applying Active Learning to Improve Sentiment Classification. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2016), pages 64-70, . [  ]

Publications 2015:

O . Modeling Variations of First-Order Horn Abduction in Answer Set Programming. Technical Report, Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Marmara University, , arXiv:1512.08899 [cs.AI]. [  ]

C . Modeling Abduction over Acyclic First-Order Logic Horn Theories in Answer Set Programming: Preliminary Experiments. In: International Workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Solving Problems with Combinatorial Explosion (RCRA), volume 1451 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 76-90, . [  ]

C  and . Using Semantic Web Resources for Solving Winograd Schemas: Sculptures, Shelves, Envy, and Success. In: Posters&Demos@SEMANTiCS 2015 and DSci15 Workshop, volume 1481 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 22-25, . [  ]

C , , and . On Structural Analysis of Non-Ground Answer-Set Programs. In: International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP), Technical Communications, volume 1433 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, . [  ]