Answering Why and How questions with respect to a frame-based knowledge base: a preliminary report

Being able to answer questions with respect to a given text is the cornerstone of language understanding and at the primary school level students are taught how to answer various kinds of questions including why and how questions. In the building of automated question answering systems the focus so far has been more on factoid questions and comparatively little attention has been devoted to answering why and how questions. In this paper we explore answering why and how questions with respect to a frame-based knowledge base and give algorithms and ASP (answer set programming) implementation to answer two classes of questions in the Biology domain. They are of the form: "How are X and Y related in the process Z?" and "Why is X important to Y?"