Towards deep reasoning with respect to natural language text in scientific domains

In this paper we take some initial steps towards deep reasoning with respect to natural language text in scientific domains. In particular we consider answering Why and How questions with respect to a high school Biology text. In comparison to other kinds of questions, Why and How questions (the later referred to as procedural questions by some) have been less explored in the Question Answering literature. However, they have been considered to a greater degree in the Reasoning about Actions literature and in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning literature. In this paper we borrow some ideas from those literature and use answer set programming (ASP) as the knowledge representation language. A key concern in our representation of natural language statements and questions is that one should be able to obtain the ASP representation of natural language text in an automated way. We also briefly discuss how some of the background knowledge needed for deep reasoning can be obtained automatically and how various levels of approximate reasoning can be done.

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