An Approach to Deductive Question-Answering.

摘要

This paper is concerned with a variety of issues which arise in deductive question-answering. Its principal concern is with the design of a retrieval system which combines current techniques for query evaluation on relational data bases with a deductive component in such a way that the interface between the two is both clean and natural. More specifically, a suitably designed theorem prover sweeps through the intensional data base (i.e., the set of general facts about the domain of interest), extracting all information relevant to a given query. The end result of this sweep is a set of queries, each of which is then evaluated over the extensional data base (i.e., the set of specific facts). The union of the answers returned from each of these queries is the set of answers to the original query. This paper also addresses some issues on how best to structure a data base. Part of this paper is concerned with issues of integrity. Finally an approach for compiling the intensional data base is proposed.