Interpretation of conceptual diagrams from line segments and strings

A conceptual diagram is a kind of diagram which represents a logical structure among concepts using simple physical objects (loops, lines and character strings). This paper presents a method of interpretation of conceptual diagrams. In conceptual diagrams, a single physical object plays various logical roles depending on surrounding physical objects, because there are no specific ruled of writing conceptual diagrams. To cope with this problem, we introduce the strategy of hypothesis generation and verification; hypothesized interpretations are verified by relaxation which takes account of logical relations to other physical objects. From the experimental results using 50 conceptual diagrams, we discuss the effectiveness of our method.