First-Order Inference and the Interpretation of Questions and Answers
Johan Bos, Malte Gabsdil, Im Stadtwald · 2000
Building on work by Groenendijk and Stokhof, we develop a theory of question and answer interpretation for first-order formalisms. The proposed framework is less fine-grained than its higher-order ancestor, but instead offers attractive implementational properties as it deals with the combinatorial explosion problem underlying Groenendijk and Stokhof's original theory. To incorporate the treatment of questions and answers in a larger setting, we use an extension of Discourse Representation Theory to cover typical contextual phenomena such as anaphora and presupposition. The actual interpretation of the dialogue representation is done via a translation to first-order logic. A prototype implementation, using state-of-the-art theorem proving and model building facilities, supports the idea that this first-order approximation of the interpretation of questions and answers is indeed a useful one. 1. Introduction This paper discusses the treatment of questions and answers in automatic dial...