Answering Questions about Complex Events

Abstract

Reasoning about event structure is a fundamental research problem in Artificial Intelligence. Event scenarios and procedures are inherently about change of state. To understand them and answer questions about them requires a means of describing, simulating and analyzing the underlying processes, taking into account preconditions and effects, the resources they produce and consume, and their interactions with each other. We propose a novel, comprehensive event schema that covers many of the parameters required and has explicit links to language through FrameNet. Based on the event schema, we have implemented a dynamic model of events capable of simulation and causal inference. We describe the results of applying this event reasoning platform to question answering and system diagnosis, providing responses to questions on justification, temporal projection, ability and 'what-if' hypotheticals, as well as complex problems in diagnosis of systems with incomplete knowledge.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 19, 2008
Accession Number
ADA518661

Entities

People

  • Steve K. Sinha

Organizations

  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Automata Theory
  • Chemical Weapons
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Geography
  • Information Systems
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Named Entity Recognition
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Ontologies

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval