Order-Based Inference in Natural Logic

This paper develops a version of Natural Logic – an inference system that works directly on natural language syntactic representations, with no intermediate translation to logical formulae. Following work by Sánchez, we develop a small fragment that computes semantic order relations between derivation trees in Categorial Grammar. The proposed system has the following new characteristics: (i) It uses orderings between derivation trees as purely syntactic units, derivable by a formal calculus. (ii) The system is extended for conjunctive phenomena like coordination and relative clauses. This allows a simple account of non-monotonic expressions that are reducible to conjunctions of monotonic ones. (iii) A decision procedure for provability is developed for a fragment of Natural Logic.