A reason to optimize information processing with a core property of natural language

Abstract

We focus on a property of natural language enabling the processing of information conveyed by linguistic expressions: structural asymmetry. We provide evidence that structural asymmetry is a property of argument structure. We focus on Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems and we provide evidence that these systems fail to recover natural language argument structure asymmetrical relations and thus they may fail to retrieve relevant documents from large databases and to provide relevant answers to questions. The processing of the underlying asymmetric relations will contribute to the optimization of Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems.