Reasoning with a Discourse Model and Conceptual Representations

GETARUNS, the system for text and reference understanding which is currently used for summarization and text generation has a highly sophisticated linguistically based semantic module which is used to build up the Discourse Model. Semantic processing is strongly modularized and distributed amongst a number of different submodules which take care of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning, Discourse Level Anaphora Resolution, and other subsidiary processes like Topic Hierarchy which cooperate when creating semantic individuals. These are then asserted in the Discourse Model (hence the DM), which is then the sole knowledge structure for the reasoning processes to be independently carried out in BACK 5.2, the knowledge representation language which is used to do linguistically advanced queries. Some of the inference on events and their participants are elaborated on the basis of a subsidiary knowledge source constituted by Conceptual Representations for main event related predicated, already grafted onto the logical syntax of BACK programming language.