A Modular Architecture for the Wide-Coverage Translation of Natural Language Texts into Predicate Logic Formulas

We present a new method for translating unrestricted natural language texts into predicate logic formulas. This relies on the semantic evaluation procedure of Scope Control Theory (SCT), a variant of Dynamic Semantic formalisms. The key benefit is that parsed syntactic structures are shown to form sufficient input for semantic evaluation, eliminating the need to build distinct semantic expressions to feed semantic evaluation. To have parsed syntactic structures for SCT to evaluate we apply an existing wide-coverage syntactic parser by converting the parser output into a form SCT can receive. This modularity has led to the rapid attainment of a broad coverage on real text. An experiment revealed our system achieved 82.7% coverage on real-world sentences, generating representations that make explicit the scopes of quantifiers (e.g., ∃x), operators (e.g., negation), connectives (e.g., conjunction) and embedding predicates (e.g., thinks), while also capturing the inter and intra sentential dependencies and cross-sentential anaphoric dependencies that connect predicates.