Using the AIDA Language to Formally Organize Scientific Claims

TL;DR

This paper introduces the AIDA controlled natural language to organize scientific claims, enabling better automatic knowledge management and semantic analysis in scientific communication.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, intuitive, and flexible language framework that facilitates formal organization of scientific claims without requiring formal logic expertise.

Findings

AIDA language is well accepted by users.

Provides a foundation for scientific knowledge graph creation.

Preliminary studies show promising applications.

Abstract

Scientific communication still mainly relies on natural language written in scientific papers, which makes the described knowledge very difficult to access with automatic means. We can therefore only make limited use of formal knowledge organization methods to support researchers and other interested parties with features such as automatic aggregations, fact checking, consistency checking, question answering, and powerful semantic search. Existing approaches to solve this problem by improving the scientific communication methods have either very restricted coverage, require formal logic skills on the side of the researchers, or depend on unreliable machine learning for the formalization of knowledge. Here, I propose an approach to this problem that is general, intuitive, and flexible. It is based on a unique kind of controlled natural language, called AIDA, consisting of English sentences that are atomic, independent, declarative, and absolute. Such sentences can then serve as nodes in a network of scientific claims linked to publications, researchers, and domain elements. I present here some small studies on preliminary applications of this language. The results indicate that it is well accepted by users and provides a good basis for the creation of a knowledge graph of scientific findings.