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.
We would like to thank Patrick Blackburn, Paul Dekker, Jeroen Groenendijk, Maarten Marx, Stuart Shieber, and the anonymous referees for their useful comments and discussions. The 13th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, the 13th Amsterdam Colloquium, and Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information provided stimulating environments that led to this collaboration. The second author is supported by the United States National Science Foundation under Grant IRI-9712068.
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ten Cate, B., Shan, Cc. (2002). Question Answering: From Partitions to Prolog. In: Egly, U., Fermüller, C.G. (eds) Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods. TABLEAUX 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2381. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45616-3_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45616-3_18
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