THE BASEBALL PROGRAM: AN AUTOMATIC QUESTION-ANSWERERnVOLUME I

摘要

Baseball is a computer program that answers questions posed in ordinary English about baseball data stored in the computer. The program com¬bines linguistic analysis with data retrieval and processing. A question is read into the computer from punched cards and the words and idioms are looked up in a dictionary. The dictionary definitions are used to ana¬lyze the question's syntactic structure and semantic content. A specifi¬cation list is formed symbolizing the relevant information to be re¬trieved and the processing to be done to answer the question. A search process utilizes the specification list to extract the relevant information from the data and to organize the result for further processing where needed. The baseball data, which are stored hierarchically, consist of the month, day, place, teams arid scores for games played in the Amer¬ican League in 1959.nThis report describes the Baseball Program in detail and explains the programming procedures and algorithms that were used in each section of the program. Volume II includes flow diagrams of all major routines in the program and some results of the program's use. as well as fur¬ther documentation.