Vulcan/MeetingNotes/Aug23 2013

Update

• Created a plan for a prototype system that will work on three example questions.

• Stephen helped design a representation for the rules. We will have human-authored rules that will be translated to Tuffy's MLN format.
• See documents on rule representation and transforming to MLN syntax for details.

• Weak evidence finder.

• Greg is getting started on weak evidence finder.
• Started a specs page for this component.
• Greg will flesh out the details.

• How to perform procedural escapes within Tuffy? Tuffy doesn't support procedural escapes but we can make do with some hacks.

• Tuffy allows built-in postgres functions in inference rules.
• We can write our own postgres procedures (e.g., stemmer, head word extractor etc.) that can be used as a function in the inference rule.
• Tuffy developers think this should be doable easily.

• Other MLN Systems:

1. RockIt (Mathias Neipert and co.) -- Quite similar to Tuffy but is faster (supposedly). Seems to have more convenient notations for representing textual arguments. Not easy to have constraints on variables used in rules. Don't know if this system can support procedural escapes easily. Will find out.
2. theBeast (Sebastian Reiedel) -- Representations are suited for textual arguments but system does not support marginal inference (i.e., computing the probability of a query predicate).

• Get a knowledge spec:

• isa, partOf, etc.
• We have portions of the Aura KB available but they may not be very useful for the current task (grade-level science vs. college level bio).

• Stephen to take lead on definition extractor.

• Send Stephen literature and other material for definition processing.

• What are the research problems?

• Definitions extractor
• Reading rules from text.
• Abductive reasoning
• Procedural escapes for textual matching.