On the Automatic Generation of Intermediate Logic Forms for WordNet Glosses

This paper presents an automatically generated Intermediate Logic Form of WordNet’s glosses. Our proposed logic form includes neo-Davidsonian reification in a simple and flat syntax close to natural language. We offer a comparison with other semantic representations such as those provided by Hobbs and Extended WordNet. Our Intermediate Logic Forms provide a representation suitable to perform semantic inference without the brittleness that characterizes those approaches based on first-order logic and theorem proving. In its current form, the representation allows to tackle semantic phenomena such as co-reference and pronominal anaphora resolution. The Intermediate Logic Forms are straightforwardly obtained from the output of a pipeline consisting of a part-of-speech tagger, a dependency parser and our own Intermediate Logic Form generator (all freely available tools). We apply the pipeline to the glosses of WordNet 3.0 to obtain a lexical resource ready to be used as knowledge base or resource for a variety of tasks involving some kind of semantic inference. We present a qualitative evaluation of the resource and discuss its possible application in Natural Language Understanding.