Natural language syntax and first-order inference

摘要

We have argued elsewhere that first-order inference can be made more efficient by using nonstandard syntax for first-order logic. In this paper we define a syntax for first-order logic based on the structure of natural language under Montague semantics. We show that, for a certain fairly expressive fragment of this language, satisfiability is polynomial time decidable. The polynomial time decision procedure can be used as a subroutine in general purpose inference systems and seems to be more powerful than analogous procedures based on either classical or taxonomic syntax.