InferenceNet.Br: Expression of Inferentialist Semantic Content of the Portuguese Language

Often, the information necessary for a complete understanding of texts is implicit, which requires drawing inferences from the use of concepts in the linguistic praxis. We consider that the usual semantic reasoners of natural language systems face difficulties in capturing this knowledge, due mainly to the lack of linguistic-semantic resources that support reasoning of this nature. This paper presents a new linguistic resource that expresses semantic-inferentialist knowledge for the Portuguese language – InferenceNet.Br – containing a base of concepts and a base of sentence patterns. These bases provide content for a top layer of semantic reasoning in natural language systems, where semantic relations are considered according to their roles in inferences, as premises or conclusions. This linguistic resource was used in a system for extracting information about crime, and the results of this proof of concept are discussed.