A Grammar Base Question Answering Procedure

The subject of this paper is a procedure for
the automatic retrieval of certain segments of 
stored information, either explicitly or implicitly represented,
through questions posed in natural language 
sentences.  This procedure makes use of a sentence recognition
device for the class of grammars which 
will correctly decide between the grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences of a natural language.  It 
is possible to make use of a recognition device of this
sort for the following reason: Much data is fully 
expressible as a set of sentences in a natural language,
a set which can be exhaustively and exclusively 
generated by a grammar.  Based upon the rules of this grammar,
a sentence recognizer will evaluate sentences, 
questions in the normal situation.  Since the recognition
function succeeds just in case the posed question 
is drawn from the set of sentences expressing the data,
or, more correctly, is grammatical in terms of 
the grammar for this set of sentences, sentence recognition
itself is a procedure for retrieving information. 
 When the recognition function succeeds, its
value represents the requested information.

CACM October, 1967

Rosenbaum, P.

CA671006 JB February 27, 1978  2:14 PM

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