A Natural Logic for Natural-language Knowledge Bases

We describe a natural logic for computational reasoning with a regimented fragment of natural language. The natural logic comes with intuitive inference rules enabling deductions and with an internal graph representation facilitating conceptual path finding between pairs of terms as an approach to semantic querying.

Our core natural logic proposal covers formal ontologies and generative extensions thereof. It further provides means of expressing general relationships between classes in an application. We discuss extensions of the core natural logic with various conservative as well as non-conservative constructs in order to approach scientific use of natural language.

Finally, we outline a prototype system addressing life science for the natural logic knowledge base setup being under continuous development.