Paper

A bidirectional mapping between English and CNF-based reasoners

Author: Steven Abney (University of Michigan)

Abstract

If language is a transduction between sound and meaning, the target of semantic interpretation should be the meaning representation expected by general cognition. Automated reasoners provide the best available fully-explicit proxies for general cognition, and they commonly expect Clause Normal Form (CNF) as input. There is a well-known algorithm for converting from unrestricted predicate calculus to CNF, but it is not invertible, leaving us without a means to transduce CNF back to English. I present a solution, with possible repercussions for the overall framework of semantic interpretation.

Keywords: semantic interpretation, reversible grammar, automated reasoning

How to Cite: Abney, S. (2018) “A bidirectional mapping between English and CNF-based reasoners”, Society for Computation in Linguistics. 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R5PZ571N