Answering Comparison Questions in SHAKEN: A Progress Report

Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

An important class of questions for knowledge based systems concern comparisons, such as "How is X like r." and "How are X and Y different?" This paper describes how we have used a cognitive simulation of analogical processing to answer such questions, to support domain experts in entering new knowledge. We outline techniques for case construction and summarization of comparison results that have been developed and refined based on an independent formative evaluation. In addition to these techniques, we discuss the role of the comparison system in SHAKEN, the larger system in which they are embedded, and our plans for further improvements.