Abductive language interpretation as bottom-up deduction

Henning Christiansen
Department of Computer Science
Roskilde University, P.O.Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark

A translation of abductive language interpretation problems into a deductive form is proposed and shown to be correct. No meta-level overhead is involved in the resulting formulas that can be evaluated by bottom-up deduction, e.g., by considering them as Constraint Handling Rules. The problem statement may involve background theories with integrity constraints, and minimal contexts are produced that can explain a discourse given.

Keywords: Abduction-as-deduction, language interpretation, context comprehension.

Proc. NLULP 2002, Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 28th, 2002. Datalogiske Skrifter 92, pp.\ 33-48, Roskilde University, 2002. See pdf.