AUTOMATIC QUESTION-ANSWERING OF ENGLISH-LIKE QUESTIONS ABOUT ARITHMETIC,

Abstract

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)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1968
Accession Number
AD0682339

Entities

People

  • Manfred Kochen

Organizations

  • RCA Corporation

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Arithmetic
  • Automatic
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Language

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Linear Algebra
  • Theoretical Analysis.