Automatic Question-Answering of English-Like Questions About Arithmetic

摘要

The report describes an English-like source language of questions and a procedure whereby a computer program can analyze any question in that language and produce a program that searches for the answer. The source language is an extension of a previously developed source language which consisted of questions about simple diagrams. The extended language admits questions involving counting and arithmetic. This extension is a second constructive step toward exploring the fundamental limits of how far such a source language can be extended toward encompassing all the answerable questions that can be posed in English and answered by a computer. The use of syntactic transformations to express relations (e.g., the commutative law) and definitions (e.g., primeness) is of special interest. (Author)