A Model for Composing Semantic Relations

This paper presents a model to compose semantic relations. The model is independent of any particular set of relations and uses an extended definition for semantic relations. This extended definition includes restrictions on the domain and range of relations and utilizes semantic primitives to characterize them. Primitives capture elementary properties between the arguments of a relation. An algebra for composing semantic primitives is used to automatically identify the resulting relation of composing a pair of compatible relations. Inference axioms are obtained. Axioms take as input a pair of semantic relations and output a new, previously ignored relation. The usefulness of this proposed model is shown using PropBank relations. Eight inference axioms are obtained and their accuracy and productivity are evaluated. The model offers an unsupervised way of accurately extracting additional semantics from text.