Procedural semantics for a question-answering machine

Abstract

Simmons has presented a survey of some fifteen experimental question-answering and related systems which have been constructed since 1959. These systems take input questions in natural English (subject to varying constraints) and attempt to answer the questions on the basis of a body of information, called the data base, which is stored inside the computer. This process can be conceptually divided into three phases---syntatic analysis, semantic analysis, and retrieval, as illustrated schematically in Figure 1. The first phase consists of parsing the input sentence into a structure which explicitly represents the grammatical relationships among the words of the sentence. Using this information the second component constructs a representation of the semantic content or "meaning" of the sentence. The remaining phase consists of procedures for either retrieving the answer directly from the data base, or else deducing the answer from information contained in the data base. The dotted lines in the figure represent the possible use of feedback from the later stages to aid in parsing and semantic interpretation.