A Natural Logic System for Large Knowledge Bases

This paper describes principles and structure for a software system that implements a dialect of natural logic for knowledge bases. Natural logics are formal logics that resemble stylized natural language fragments, and whose reasoning rules reflect common-sense reasoning. Natural logics may be seen as forms of extended syllogistic logic. The paper proposes and describes realization of deductive querying functionalities using a previously specified natural logic dialect called NaturaLog. In focus here is the engineering of an inference engine employing as a key feature relational database operations. Thereby the inference steps are subjected to computation in bulk for scaling-up to large knowledge bases. Accordingly, the system eventually is to be realized as a general-purpose database application package with the database being turned logical knowledge base.