Logical Semantics, Dialogical Argumentation, and Textual Entailment
This work addresses automated textual entailment for natural language processing, representing an incremental step towards an inferentialist view of semantics.
The authors tackled the problem of automated textual entailment by introducing a new dialogical system for first-order classical logic that mimics natural language argumentation and proving its completeness, then combining it with a syntactic and semantic parser to decide if a sentence follows from a short text.
In this chapter, we introduce a new dialogical system for first order classical logic which is close to natural language argumentation, and we prove its completeness with respect to usual classical validity. We combine our dialogical system with the Grail syntactic and semantic parser developed by the second author in order to address automated textual entailment, that is, we use it for deciding whether or not a sentence is a consequence of a short text. This work-which connects natural language semantics and argumentation with dialogical logic-can be viewed as a step towards an inferentialist view of natural language semantics.