Logical fusion rules for merging structured news reports

Structured text is a general concept that is implicit in a variety of approaches to handling information. Syntactically, an item of structured text is a number of grammatically simple phrases together with a semantic label for each phrase. Items of structured text may be nested within larger items of structured text. Much information is potentially available as structured text including tagged text in XML, text in relational and object-oriented databases, and the output from information extraction systems in the form of instantiated templates. In previous papers, we have presented a logic-based framework for merging items of potentially inconsistent structured text Hun00a, Hun02b]. In this paper, we present fusion rules as a way of implementing logic-based fusion. Fusion rules are a form of scripting language that deene how structured news reports should be merged. The antecedent of a fusion rule is a call to investigate the information in the structured news reports and the background knowledge, and the consequent of a fusion rule is a formula specifying an action to be undertaken to form a merged report. It is expected that a set of fusion rules is deened for any given application. We give the syntax and mode of execution for fusion rules, and explain how the resulting actions give a merged report. We illustrate the presentation with examples of fusion rules for an application for merging weather reports.