Reasoning with inconsistency in structured text

Abstract

Reasoning with inconsistency involves some compromise on classical logic. There is a range of proposals for logics (called paraconsistent logics) for reasoning with inconsistency each with pros and cons. Selecting an appropriate paraconsistent logic for an application depends upon the requirements of the application. Here we review paraconsistent logics for the potentially significant application area of technology for structured text. Structured text is a general concept that is implicit in a variety of approaches to handling information. Syntactically, an item of structured text is a number of grammatically simple phrases together with a semantic label for each phrase. Items of structured text may be nested within larger items of structured text. The semantic labels in a structured text are meant to parameterize a stereotypical situation, and so a particular item of structured text is an instance of that stereotypical situation. Much information is potentially available as structured text, including tagged text in XML, text in relational and object-oriented databases, and the output from information extraction systems in the form of instantiated templates. In this review paper, we formalize the concept of structured text, and then focus on how we can identify inconsistency in items of structured text, and reason with these inconsistencies. Then we review key approaches to paraconsistent reasoning, and discuss the application of them to reasoning with inconsistency in structured text.