Jared L. Darlington


1963

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Translating ordinary language into symbolic logic
Jared L. Darlington
Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics

The paper describes a computer program, written in COMIT, for translating ordinary English into the notation of propositional logic and first-order functional logic. The program is designed to provide an ordinary language input to a COMIT program for the David-Putnam proof-procedure algorithm. The entire set of operations which are performed on an input sentence or argument are divided into three stages. In Stage I, an input sentence ‘S’, such as “The composer who wrote ‘Alcina’ wrote some operas in English,” is rewritten in a quasi-logical notation, “The X/A such that X/A is a composer and X/A wrote Alcina wrote some X/B such that X/B is an opera and X/B is in English.” The quasi-logical notation serves as an intermediate language between logic and ordinary English. In Stage II, S is translated into the logical notation of propositional functions and quantifiers, or of propositional logic, whichever is appropriate. In Stage III, S is run through the proof-procedure program and evaluated. (The sample sentence quoted is of course ‘invalid’, i.e. nontautological.) The COMIT program for Stage III is complete, that for Stage II is almost complete, and that for Stage I is incomplete. The paper describes the work done to date on the programs for Stages I and II.
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