An approach toward answering English questions from text

Abstract

Research on question answering by Raphael, Black, and Elliott, and our own work on Protosynthex II has shown that question-answering algorithms can be most easily written if the text source is in the form of simple, explicitly structured sets of subject-verb-nominal strings. Question-answering algorithms that have thus far been developed include word- and structure-matching operations and some few logical inference functions. All of the systems cited have in some fashion limited their input language to simple subject-verb-nominal strings, thus eliminating many problems of syntactic analysis and providing a normalized form for language data.