Date: Wednesday, 20-Nov-96 20:04:56 GMT Server: NCSA/1.3 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Friday, 24-Feb-95 18:35:34 GMT Content-length: 3952 Episodic Logic

Episodic Logic

Episodic Logic was developed for use as a semantic theory for natural language understanding. It was designed to meet the following requirements:

The most distinctive aspect of EL is its use of episodes, which are similar to situations in situation semantics. Like a situation, an episode characterizes a partial state of affairs over some period of time at some location. It subsumes the notion of events that is used in many representations based on Davidson [1967], because an event is a particular kind of episode.

Episodic Logic readily lends itself to inference; contrary to a widespread myth a rich syntax is no impediment to effective inference. Though only a very limited set of EL inference capabilities had been used in TRAINS-93, EL has been separately implemented in the EPILOG system. EPILOG is a powerful knowledge management and inference system allowing data-driven inference, goal-driven inference, and featuring integration with about a dozen specialist modules for accelerating temporal, taxonomic, partonomic, set-theoretic, numeric, and other special types of inference.


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Andrew D. Simchik