Inverting Grice's Maxims to Learn Rules from Natural Language Extractions

Sorower, Mohammad S., Doppa, Janardhan R., Orr, Walker, Tadepalli, Prasad, Dietterich, Thomas G., Fern, Xiaoli Z.

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We consider the problem of learning rules from natural language text sources. These sources, such as news articles and web texts, are created by a writer to communicate information to a reader, where the writer and reader share substantial domain knowledge. Consequently, the texts tend to be concise and mention the minimum information necessary for the reader to draw the correct conclusions. We study the problem of learning domain knowledge from such concise texts, which is an instance of the general problem of learning in the presence of missing data. However, unlike standard approaches to missing data, in this setting we know that facts are more likely to be missing from the text in cases where the reader can infer them from the facts that are mentioned combined with the domain knowledge.