Formal methods in the design of question-answering systems

摘要

This paper contributes to the discussion whether and how predicate calculus should be used as a deep structure in question-answering programs. The first part of the paper stresses that there are several possible ways of using predicate calculus, and argues that predicate calculus has significant advantages above competing deep structures if the way of using it is carefully selected. The second half gives hints on how various natural-language constructions can be encoded in a consistent way, and how axion sets that define these encodings can be written and debugged.