Automated Reasoning and Common Sense: Higher Order Aspirations with First Order Logic

One of the challenges of today`s information society is to cope with the immense amount of digitally stored texts. Progress in this area could be made if computers could somehow understand these texts or even answer questions about their content. This Master`s thesis describes a possible approach to this challenge. It examines how computers could answer common sense questions on a text by combining natural language processing, automated reasoning and ontological knowledge. A practical side describes a prototypical system that applies a theorem prover to natural language and ontological knowledge. A theoretical side is concerned with the transformation of Higher Order Logic, which is used in the ontology, to First Order Logic that can be digested by theorem provers. Particular attention is paid to the efficient handling of equality and the adequate representation of propositional predicates in First Order Logic. These experiences and analyses could be first stepping stones towards opening the world of natural language reasoning to computers.