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# Using English for commonsense knowledge

**Authors:** Allan Ramsay and Debora Field · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2009), pp. 181–194 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W09-3717](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3717/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W09-37/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3717/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-3717.pdf)

**Authors (2)**

1. Allan Ramsay
2. Debora Field

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper argues for writing commonsense rules as English sentences, for example "eating fruit which contains vitamin C is good for X if X has scurvy", and for translating them into logical forms with a compositional grammar. A yes-or-no question is answered by theorem proving in property theory, and the explanation given to the user is taken from the proof tree. The examples are diet dialogues. The problems the authors discuss are intensional nouns and verbs, downward entailment (eating berries follows from eating fruit that contains vitamin C), paraphrase such as "allergic to" and "has an allergy to", which they normalise to one form during parsing rather than with two-way rules that loop, and the risk that proofs grow with the rule set. Proofs for the examples take about 0.1 second. The paper has no benchmark numbers; it is a design paper.

## Ideas

- I1. Write commonsense rules as English sentences parsed by `en` into the frames that `prag` already reads (`prag/src/frames.rs`). A rule is then a sentence, not a hand-written formula, and the parse coverage of the rule set can be measured.
- I2. Downward entailment as a deterministic check: "good for X if the broader kind is good for X" uses the hypernyms in `en/src/dict.rs`. Test it on lesson questions about berries and fruit.
- I3. Normalise paraphrases at parse time to one frame, as the paper does during logical form construction, not as two-way rules, which avoids loops in the reasoner.
- I4. Explanations from the trace: each answer lists the rules it used, so a student's answer can say why. Measure the share of answers that have a rule trace.

## For Mova

Chapters: [23. Complementation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/23-complementation/) (propositional attitudes) and [19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs`, `en/src/dict.rs`, `world/src/qa.rs`. Measure: parse coverage of the rule sentences and the share of answers with a rule trace, run twice.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{ramsay2009using,
  title = {{Using English for commonsense knowledge}},
  author = {Ramsay, Allan and Field, Debora},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W09-3717/}
}
```

- [← previous Annotating tense, mood and voice for English, French and German](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ramm-2017-annotating-tense-mood-voice-english/)
- [next → "You might think about slightly revising the title": Identifying Hedges in Peer-tutoring Interactions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/raphalen-2022-you-might-think-about-slightly/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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