The Process Of Question Answering

Problems in computational question answering assume a new perspective when question answering is viewed as a problem in natural language processing. A theory of question answering has been proposed which relies on ideas in conceptual information processing and theories of human memory organization. This theory of question answering has been implemented in a computer program, QUALM, currently being used by two story understanding systems to complete a natural language processing system which reads stories and answers questions about what was read. The processes in QUALM are divided into 4 phases: (1) Conceptual categorization which guides subsequent processing by dictating which specific inference mechanisms and memory retrieval strategies should be invoked in the course of answering a question; (2) Inferential analysis which is responsible for understanding what the questioner really meant when a question should not be taken literally; (3) Content specification which determines how much of an answer should be returned in terms of detail and elaborations, and (4) Retrieval heuristics which do the actual digging to extract an answer from memory.