The Process of Question Answering

By W. Lehnert. 2022

414 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract : 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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff79d5d1282aea51195afcb7de898dca2c879a97

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

Citations in the corpus

Handbook of discourse processes (2003, background): “Other questions address complex relations between the question statement and related ideas, including relations of cause (why?), reason (how?), and time (when?) (Graesser & Murachver, 1985; Lehnert, 1978; Trabasso et al., 1984).”
Question-asking in childhood: A review of the literature and a framework for understanding its development (2018, background): “For example, children (and adults) request information about labels, facts, procedures, and causal mechanisms and they can do so to obtain clarification, to rule out possible hypotheses, and out of curiosity or “wonderment” (Graesser & Person, 1994; Lehnert, 1978; Luce & Hsi, 2015).”
Explanation and Argumentation Capabilities:Towards the Creation of More Persuasive Agents (2002, background): “…in response to the user’s request for information (Rissland 1983; Rissland et al. 1984), anticipating the type of questions that a user might ask (Lehnert 1978; Hughes 1986), planning responses so as not to mislead the inquirer (Joshi and Weber 1984), identifying prior situations and…”
Questions, questioning, and institutional practices: an introduction (2009, methodology): “In discourse processing research, for instance, a domain centrally related to education and learning, Graesser (1990) and Lehnert (1978) used a typology that made three distinctions: questions that seek verification (Y-N), open-ended questions (i.e. wh-), and comparison questions (alternative).”