Question answering: from partitions to Prolog

Abstract. We implement Groenendijk and Stokhof's partition semantics of questions in a simple question answering algorithm. The algorithm is sound, complete, and based on tableau theorem proving. The algorithm relies on a syntactic characterization of answerhood: Any answer to a question is equivalent to some formula built up only from instances of the question. We prove this characterization by translating the logic of interrogation to classical predicate logic and applying Craig's interpolation theorem. 1 The Partition Theory of Questions An elegant account of the semantics of natural language questions from a logical and mathematical perspective is the one provided by Groenendijk and Stokhof [8]. According to them, a question denotes a partition of a logical space of possibilities. In this section, we give a brief summary of this influential theory, using a notation slightly different from Groenendijk's presentation [7]. A question is essentially a first order formula...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Balder ten Cate, Chung-chieh Shan
• Keywords: Algorithm, CORR 2002, Education, Order Formula, Questions