Discourse Understanding is hard. This seems to be especially true for mathematical discourse, that is proofs. Restricting discourse to mathematical discourse allow us, however, to study the subject matter in its purest form. This domain of discourse is rich and welldefined, highly structured, offers a well-defined set of discourse relations and forces/allows us to apply mathematical reasoning. We give a brief discussion on selected linguistic phenomena of mathematical discourse, and an analysis from the mathematician’s point of view. Requirements for a theory of discourse representation are given, followed by a discussion of proofs plans that provide necessary context and structure. A large part of semantics construction is defined in terms of proof plan recognition and instantiation by matching and attaching. 1

Abstract not found

We study the relationship between the structure of discourse and the use of referring expressions in the mathematical domain. We address linguistic, algorithmic as well as representation issues. We show how referential expressions refer to mathematical statements and how a knowledge intensive approach, domain reasoning with the use of proof plans, are used for discourse understanding. We propose to represent discourse plans as underspecified discourse representation structures being selected and instantiated during discourse processing. Our main emphasis is on the handling of abstract discourse entities. 1 Motivation We have the following practical application in mind: the automatic verification of mathematical textbook proofs. Imagine a program that understands mathematical discourse. Such a device reads proofs, say mathematical arguments taken from textbooks on elementary mathematics, and is then able to communicate its knowledge about what it has read and analyzed. It answers ques...

. Our long-range goal is to implement a program for the machine verification of textbook proofs. We study the task from both the linguistics and deduction perspective and give an in-depth analysis for a sample textbook proof. A three phase model for proof understanding is developed: parsing, structuring and refining. It shows that the combined application of techniques from both NLP and AR is quite successful. Moreover, it allows to uncover interesting insights that might initiate progress in both AI disciplines. Keywords: automated reasoning, natural language processing, discourse analysis 1 Introduction In [12], John McCarthy notes that "Checking mathematical proofs is potentially one of the most interesting and useful applications of automatic computers". In the first half of the 1960s, one of his students, namely Paul Abrahams, implemented a Lisp program for the machine verification of mathematical proofs [1]. The program, named Proofchecker, "was primarily directed towar...

We propose a promising research problem, the machine verification of textbook proofs. It shows that textbook proofs are a sufficiently complex and highly structured form of discourse, embedded in a well-defined and well-understood domain, thus offering an ideal domain for discourse analysis. Because recognizing the structure of a proof is a prerequisite for verifying the correctness of a given mathematical argument, we define a four component model of discourse segmentation. 1 Introduction In order to advance our knowledge of discourse understanding, we have to 1. tackle real-world problems, that is study discourse that is sufficiently complex; 2. build ontologies and formalize knowledge about the domain of discourse; 3. seriously address representation issues; 4. apply reasoning techniques. This is nothing new. But did you ever see a natural language system where each of these four issues has been successfully addressed? Contrarily, many research resources has been spent on a family...