2 research outputs found
Sketching the vision of the Web of Debates
The exchange of comments, opinions, and arguments in blogs, forums, social media, wikis, and review websites has transformed the Web into a modern agora, a virtual place where all types of debates take place. This wealth of information remains mostly unexploited: due to its textual form, such information is difficult to automatically process and analyse in order to validate, evaluate, compare, combine with other types of information and make it actionable. Recent research in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Computational Argumentation has provided some solutions, which still cannot fully capture important aspects of online debates, such as various forms of unsound reasoning, arguments that do not follow a standard structure, information that is not explicitly expressed, and non-logical argumentation methods. Tackling these challenges would give immense added-value, as it would allow searching for, navigating through and analyzing online opinions and arguments, obtaining a better picture of the various debates for a well-intentioned user. Ultimately, it may lead to increased participation of Web users in democratic, dialogical interchange of arguments, more informed decisions by professionals and decision-makers, as well as to an easier identification of biased, misleading, or deceptive arguments. This paper presents the vision of the Web of Debates, a more human-centered version of the Web, which aims to unlock the potential of the abundance of argumentative information that currently exists online, offering its users a new generation of argument-based web services and tools that are tailored to their real needs
Constraining Montague Grammar for computational applications
This work develops efficient methods for the implementation of Montague Grammar on
a computer. It covers both the syntactic and the semantic aspects of that task. Using a
simplified but adequate version of Montague Grammar it is shown how to translate from
an English fragment to a purely extensional first-order language which can then be made
amenable to standard automatic theorem-proving techniques.
Translating a sentence of Montague English into the first-order predicate calculus
usually proceeds via an intermediate translation in the typed lambda calculus which is
then simplified by lambda-reduction to obtain a first-order equivalent. If sufficient sortal
structure underlies the type theory for the reduced translation to always be a first-order
one then perhaps it should be directly constructed during the syntactic analysis of the
sentence so that the lambda-expressions never come into existence and no further
processing is necessary. A method is proposed to achieve this involving the unification
of meta-logical expressions which flesh out the type symbols of Montague's type theory
with first-order schemas.
It is then shown how to implement Montague Semantics without using a theorem prover
for type theory. Nothing more than a theorem prover for the first-order predicate
calculus is required. The first-order system can be used directly without encoding the
whole of type theory. It is only necessary to encode a part of second-order logic and
this can be done in an efficient, succinct, and readable manner. Furthermore the
pseudo-second-order terms need never appear in any translations provided by the parser.
They are vital just when higher-order reasoning must be simulated.
The foundation of this approach is its five-sorted theory of Montague Semantics. The
objects in this theory are entities, indices, propositions, properties, and quantities. It is a
theory which can be expressed in the language of first-order logic by means of axiom
schemas and there is a finite second-order axiomatisation which is the basis for the
theorem-proving arrangement. It can be viewed as a very constrained set theory