Dissertation Abstract
Knowledge Graphs And Logic: One Of Two
Kinds
by
Harmen Van Den Berg
Degree: DR.
Year: 1993
Pages: 00211
Institution: Universiteit Twente (THE NETHERLANDS);
0237
Source: DAI, 55, no. 03C, (1993): 0940
Standard
No: ISBN: 90-9006360-9
Many
current approaches of natural language understanding are objectivistic, which
means that the semantics of natural language is described independently of the
human being engaged in the process of understanding. As a consequence,
objectivist theories reduce the semantics of natural language to truth
conditions. These approaches often use logic-like formal languages to describe
the semantics of language.
In the first part of this thesis a
model for natural language understanding is developed that, unlike most current
approaches, reflects the important role humans play in determining the meaning
of language. The formal language used is Knowledge Graphs. Knowledge graphs are
networks of concepts and relations, where the relations are chosen from a
limited set of relation types. The meaning of a natural language sentence is
defined as the knowledge graph obtained by combining the graphs that are
associated with the words that sentence consists of.
In the second part of this thesis
three linguistic phenomena closely connected to logic are discussed, namely
negation, quantification, and modality. It is shown that, by introducing
negative and modal contexts, these phenomena can be adequately treated. In this
way also donkey anaphora can be satisfactory dealt with. The introduction of
these contexts amounts to extending the system of existential graphs of C. S.
Peirce, yielding logical systems in terms of graphs which are equivalent to
propositional logic, predicate logic, and the modal propositional logics K, T,
S4, S5, K45, and KD45, respectively. In this way, it is possible to perform
logical inferencing without being forced into an objectivistic framework.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: COMPUTER SCIENCE
Accession
No: AAGC358868
Provider: OCLC
Database: Dissertations