SBVR in OWL

In preparation for generating RIF and SBVR from the Linguist, we have produced an OWL ontology for the pertinent aspects of the SBVR specification.  We hope that this is helpful to others and would sincerely appreciate any corrections or comments on how to improve it.

Paul

Semantic Technology & Business Conference (SemTechBiz)

Benjamin Grosof and I will be presenting the following review of recent work at Vulcan towards Digital Aristotle as part of Project Halo at SemTechBiz in San Francisco the first week of June.

Acquiring deep knowledge from text

We show how users can rapidly specify large bodies of deep logical knowledge starting from practically unconstrained natural language text.

English sentences are semi-automatically interpreted into  predicate calculus formulas, and logic programs in SILK, an expressive knowledge representation (KR) and reasoning system which tolerates practically inevitable logical inconsistencies arising in large knowledge bases acquired from and maintained by distributed users possessing varying linguistic and semantic skill sets who collaboratively disambiguate grammar, logical quantification and scope, co-references, and word senses.

The resulting logic is generated as Rulelog, a draft standard under W3C Rule Interchange Format’s Framework for Logical Dialects, and relies on SILK’s support for FOL-like formulas, polynomial-time inference, and exceptions to answer questions such as those found in advanced placement exams.

We present a case study in understanding cell biology based on a first-year college level textbook.

Deep QA

Our efforts at acquiring deep knowledge from a college biology text have enabled us to answer a number of questions that are beyond what has been previously demonstrated.

For example, we’re answering questions like:

  1. Are the passage ways provided by channel proteins hydrophilic or hydrophobic?
  2. Will a blood cell in a hypertonic environment burst?
  3. If a Paramecium swims from a hypotonic environment to an isotonic environment, will its contractile vacuole become more active?

A couple of these are at higher levels on the Bloom scale of cognitive skills than Watson can reach (which is significantly higher than search engines).

As some other posts have shown in images, we can translate completely natural sentences into formal logic.  We actually do the reasoning using Vulcan’s SILK, which has great capabilities, including defeasibility.  We can also output to RIF or SBVR, but the temporal aspects and various things such as modality and the need for defeasibility favor SILK or Cyc for the best reasoning and QA performance.

One thing in particular is worth noting:  this approach does better with causality and temporal logic than is typically considered by most controlled natural language systems, whether they are translating to a business rules engine or a logic formalism, such as first order or description logic.  The approach promises better application development and knowledge management capabilities for more of the business process management and complex event processing markets.

Understanding English promotes better policies and requirements

Capturing some policies from a publication by the Health and Human Services department recently turned up the following….
It’s probably the case that there are more specific lists than just “some list” or “any list”, as suggested below.
This is a good thing about applying deep natural language understanding to policy statements.  It helps you say precisely what you mean, even if you are not using a rule or logic engine, but just trying to articulate your policies or requirements clearly and precisely.

HHS on expedited review