A cooperative answering system

Terry Gaasterland, Parke Godfrey, Jack Minker, and Lev Novik

Computer Science Department,
University of Maryland
College Park

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Abstract

We seek to improve human-computer communication by enabling a computer to respond to questions in a manner that accounts for a user's misconceptions, expectations, desires, and interests. We have developed a prototype system that gives cooperative answers, corrects misconceptions, and attempts to meet users' needs. The system, described in Fig. 1, uses semantic information about the database (DB) t o formulate coherent and informative answers. The work has two main thrusts:

the construction of a logic formula which embodies the content of a cooperative answer;
the presentation of the logic formula to the user in a natural language form.

Information available in a deductive database (DDB) system for building cooperative answers includes integrity constraints, user constraints, the search tree for answers to the query, and false presuppositions present in the query. The work of Gal and Minker [3] forms the basis of the CAS.

Bibliography

1. U. Chakravarthy, J. Grant, and J. Minker. Foundations of semantic query optimization for deductive databases. In J. Minker, editor, Foundations of Deductive Databases and Logic Programming, pages 243-274. Morgan-Kaufmann, 1987.
2. T. Gaasterland, P. Godfrey, and J. Minker. An Overview of Cooperative Answering. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 1992. To appear.
3. A. Gal and J. Minker. Producing Cooperative Answers in Deductive Databases. In P. S. Dizier and S. Szpakowicz, editors, Logic and Logic Grammer for Language Processing, pages 223-254. 1990.