Knowledge-Driven Text Interpretation and Question-Answering: Some Current Activities at Boeing Math and Computing Technology

New Directions in Question Answering

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

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At Boeing, we are currently developing methods for knowledge-driven text interpretation and questionanswering, based on matching analyzed input text against strong, background expectations from a knowledge-base [1]. Our goal is to be able to answer questions about text which goes beyond facts explicitly stated in the text. For example, the statement (1) "China launched a meterological satellite into orbit Wednesday" suggests that (among other things) there was a rocket launch; China probably owns the satellite; the satellite is for monitoring weather; the orbit is around Earth; etc., although none of these facts are explicit in the text.