Semantic Construction Grammar: Bridging the NL / Logic Divide
This addresses the challenge of natural language understanding for AI systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like Cyc.
The paper tackles the problem of translating between natural language and logical representations by developing Semantic Construction Grammar (SCG), a system that supports diverse representation methods and integrates with Cyc's Knowledge Base for semantic constraints and checks.
In this paper, we discuss Semantic Construction Grammar (SCG), a system developed over the past several years to facilitate translation between natural language and logical representations. Crucially, SCG is designed to support a variety of different methods of representation, ranging from those that are fairly close to the NL structure (e.g. so-called 'logical forms'), to those that are quite different from the NL structure, with higher-order and high-arity relations. Semantic constraints and checks on representations are integral to the process of NL understanding with SCG, and are easily carried out due to the SCG's integration with Cyc's Knowledge Base and inference engine.