Memory Search and Retrieval

Abstract

In order to demonstrate its understanding of an editorial, OpEd must be able to answer questions about the issues addressed in that editorial. Chapter 1 established that question answering in OpEd is characterized in terms of three processes: (1) understanding questions from the perspective of the editorial’s memory representation, or argument graph; (2) retrieving conceptual answers from the argument graph; and (3) generating conceptual answers in natural language. Furthermore, Chapter 1 indicated that question comprehension is performed by the same conceptual parser used for editorial comprehension, and answer generation is performed by a recursive-descent, English generator. This chapter examines the techniques used in the process of retrieving information from conceptual representations of editorials.