research in natural question answering systems was first reported about 44 years ago by mccarthy and l.green (1959).

the goal of these systems was the implementation of conversational computer programs that understand and respond to queries posed in natural language. within the area of information retrieval, question answering has been associated with fact retrieval, as opposed to document retrieval. that is, it is concerned with the direct answering of questions, instead of referencing of sets of documents that might contain the answers to given questions.

simmons surveyed the existing question answering systems in 1965. Those systmes can be classified into three general apporaches to the problem: logical grammatical and computational.

Of the logical approaches SAD SAM (Lindsay) and BASEBAL (Green, 1963) allowed only very specific predicates to be used: family relations and baseball statistics, respectively. Whereas, SIR (Raphael) and SQA (Black) allowed predicates such as subset, superset, on top of, below, left of, right of, etc. in contrast Darlingotn's logic programs (1962, 1964) allowed deduction within propositional calculus. Both the DEACON (thompson) and PROSYSNTHEX (Simmons, 1964) systems used a Phrase structure Grammer approach. That is, questions were matched against data base sentences on a syntactical basis to retrieve the answer ... (to be continued. source: cognitive memory, interim report 12.8, 1969-70, coordinated science lab, university of illinios, project leader heinz von foerster)

sad sam: syntactic appraiser and diagrammer semantic analyzing machine.

The program accepts English sentences about kinship relations, builds a data base and answers questions about the facts it has stored.

SAD-SAM INPUT: John is Mary's son. SAD-SAM OUTPUT: Mary's brother is John's uncle; Mary's mother is John's grandmother, etc.

literature

i can't say i get it so far. in the 60s and now the argument seems to be: it's too formal, just quantitative data.

'it is clear that the tautological transformation per se within a logicomathematical formalism cannot lead us to new insights by providing "solutions" to a "problem" (as long as no errors in calculation occur, they are just equivalent paraphrases.) unless by such paraphrasing new semantic relations become uncovered (the solution), which were opaque in the original formulation of the state of affairs (the problem) ...' (hfv, '71)

1971 heinz von foerster published a short article about "computing in the semantic domain". just recently i was falling over the illiac iv project. the supercomputer gave the scientists some hope to be able to work and proof their ideas also in the field of semantic computing. claro, it was supposed to be the most powerful computer in the world and heinz von foerster quotes g.h. barnes in the references.

... 'the other possible avenue has been opened recently by our beginning to understand the relations between semantic and syntactic structures, and by the development of computer systems of unprecedented power (barnes, g.h., 1968. the illiac iv computer. ieee tr.comp.) together with relational program structures of unprecedented sophistication (weston, p. 1970. cylinders. a relational data structure. tech rep. no 18, bcl). the idea is to abandon the strategy of reformulating the problem into terms that smack of mathematical rigor but lack the contextual richness originally perceived, and to develop the algorithms that transform the description of certain aspects of a system into paraphrases that uncover new semantic relations pertaining to the system as a whole. this is computation in the semantic domain rather than in the syntactic domain of logicmathematical formalisms. here the possibility is opened for inductive inference, a logical modality that is denied all formalisms that rest on the infallibility of the tautological transform ...'

another paper

'argues, contrary to the claims of other workers, that formal semantics in the sense of model theory cannot provide an adequate basis for the ascription of meanings in ai programs.' ( ian d.craig: logicism and meaning. the case against. jan.24, 1995, original written in 1991.)

"overview of the state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology", thanks earl.

looking forward to read the papers from von foerster and weston on semantic computing. i will have the chance next week to look into it. maybe i will find a way to do a comparison. let's see.