Vulcan/TupleRepresentation
From Knowitall
Motivation
- In designing output for extraction from definition sentences, it is useful to use both nested and n-ary tuples. Here are some examples.
Example1: Adaptation helps an organism survive in its environment Pattern: X rel1 Y rel2 Z Open IE 4.0 represents this as triples: (adaptation; helps; organism survive in its environment) (organism; survive; in its environment) Should we make the nested tuple explicit: (adaptation; helps; (organism; survive; in its environment)) Note that the nested form can be recovered from the pair of triples. Example2: The kidneys filter waste materials out of the blood Pattern: X rel Y prep Z Open IE 4.0 represents this as an n-ary tuple: (The kidneys; filter; waste materials; out of the blood) Note that additional arguments in n-ary tuples always(?) begin with a preposition.
- For deep understanding and reasoning, we want high coverage of the information in each sentence. Current Open IE often misses much of the information in a given sentence.
- The nested and n-ary representation will make inference rules more compact. Without nesting, a single sentence is represented as two separate tuples; without n-ary, a single sentence becomes multiple tuples, some of which don't make much sense on their own.
- We expect inference rules will be easier to express and easier to learn if they operate on nested and n-ary tuples, rather than the sets of binary tuples that are equivalent to the nested or n-ary tuples.
- The sample Vulcan propositions we are trying to prove are often nested or n-ary.
Examples of complex nested and n-ary tuples
Examples 2 and 3 are nested; 1 has a complex nesting; 4 is n-ary. Example 1 also has sentence internal coreference to get (turtle; take in; nutrients). 1. "A turtle eating worms is an example of taking in nutrients" ((turtle, eat, worms); is; example of (turtle; take in; nutrients)) 2. "Growth causes the leaves of a plant to become larger" (growth; cause; (leaves of plant; become; larger)) 3. "A sense of smell helps a fox find food" (sense of smell; help; (fox; find; food)) 4. "Gravity pulls the marble to the bottom of the glass" (gravity; pull; marble; to bottom of glass)