Why hasn’t someone tried this simple idea till now?

 Why hasn’t someone tried this simple idea till now?

We want relevant commonsensical (or otherwise) inferences to be generated automatically from sentences.

Here is a way to get some basic inferences from a sentence.

The key idea is this - With a word at the centre, branch out from it all of its DEFINITIVE PROPERTIES parsed from the dictionary meaning of the word.

For example, consider the word - ‘book’.

The dictionary meaning of book is - a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.

This gets parsed as - 

written or printed work, consisting of glued or sewn pages, and bound in covers

Now, write book as - 

Now, consider the sentence - A book dropped from the table.

The key words are - book, dropped and table.

STEPS - 

1. Generate the definitive properties of each word

2. Combine every definitive property of every word with that of each other in sets of 2 or 3 at a time.

3. Each such combination will be a “chunk of a sentence”.

4. Apply all above steps repeatedly over each chunk of a sentence generated.

This process repeated till a loop-depth of say 3 or 4 would enumerate a lot of relevant commonsensical and uncommonsensical inferences from the given sentence.

Principle used - 

Suppose I tell you - John gave a book to Jack.

Now there is no general magic formula to draw relevant inferences from any given sentence because, say, it could be that Jack is an extremely non-studious boy who spends all his time in sports and movies such that he hardly has touched a book. In that case, a relevant inference from this sentence would be - “a book given ! And that too to Jack! Good heavens!” meaning it is like giving a cricket bat to play cricket to a man who has never touched one in his whole life!

Now, 2 things happened here - 

1. Certain relevant sub-parts of the sentence combined to give something relevant. (John didn't turn out to be relevant (say, he is a regular guy)).

2. It is the specific definitive property of Jack that counted, in making this inference being drawn. 

So any definitive property of any of the words might combine with that of the other(s) to give some RELEVANT inference.

This principle is exploited.