Interactive Background Knowledge Acquisition for Inducing Differences among Documents

This paper presents a case study in which an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) technique is applied to natural language processing. Aleph, an ILP system, is used to induce differences among documents. A Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) system is proposed for the purpose of compiling the background knowledge inputted into Aleph. In the CBR system, lexical and syntactic information concerning words in close proximity to the target word(s) in training sentences is provided in order to infer new cases effectively. The compiled background knowledge is used to determine the semantic differences in documents that are written in natural language. Tentative experiments with this technique have produced encouraging results.