A Note on Argumentative Topology: Circularity and Syllogisms as Unsolved Problems

Abstract: In the last couple of years there were a few attempts to apply topological data analysis to text, and in particular to natural language inference. A recent work by Tymochko et al. suggests the possibility of capturing the notion of logical shape in text,' usingtopological delay embeddings,' a technique derived from dynamical systems, applied to word embeddings. In this note we reconstruct their argument and show, using several old and new examples, that the problem of connecting logic, topology and text is still very much unsolved. We conclude that there is no clear answer to the question: ``Can we find a circle in a circular argument?'' We point out some possible avenues of exploration. The code used in our experiment is also shown.