Qualitative Reasoning for Learning by Reading: A Theoretical Analysis

One of the original motivations for qualitative reasoning was to capture the informal, intuitive notions about the continuous world that we all share, learned via a combination of experience and culture. For example, prior research suggests that qualitative dynamics can play an important role in natural language semantics. However, the constraints of everyday qualitative reasoning are different from more technical professional reasoning contexts, such as engineering. This paper examines qualitative reasoning in the context of learning qualitative dynamics for domains via reading texts. Based on experience with generating qualitative models from texts, we argue that qualitative reasoning for such everyday models raises new problems for qualitative reasoning, which opens up new research frontiers.