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Deducing answers to english questions from structured data

Published: 13 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We describe ongoing research using natural English text queries as an intelligent interface for inferring answers from structured data in a specific domain. Users can express queries whose answers need to be deduced from data in different databases, without knowing the structures of those databases nor even the existence of the sources used. Users can pose queries incrementally, elaborating on an initial query, and ask follow-up questions based on answers to earlier queries.
Inference in an axiomatic theory of the subject domain links the natural form in which the question is posed to the way relevant data is represented in a database, and composes information obtained from several databases into an answer to a complex question.
We describe the status of a prototype system, called Quadri, for answering questions about HIV treatment, using the Stanford HIV Drug Resistance Database [8] and European resources. We discuss some of the problems that need to be solved to make this approach work, and some of our solutions.

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Bobrow. D.G. et al. A Basic Logic for Textual Inference. AAAI Workshop on Inference for Textual Question Answering, Pittsburgh, PA, 2005.
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Popescu, A. M., Etzioni, O. and Kautz, H. Towards a Theory of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases. Proceedings of IUI 200.
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Rhee, S. Y. et al. Human Immunodeficiency Virus Reverse Transcriptase and Protease Sequence Database. Nucleic Acids Res 31:298--303, 2003.
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Stickel, M. et al. Deductive Composition of Astronomical Software from Subroutine Libraries. Automated Deduction 12, Nancy, France, June 1994.
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  • (2011)English Access to Structured DataProceedings of the 2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing10.1109/ICSC.2011.67(13-20)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2011

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IUI '11: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
    February 2011
    504 pages
    ISBN:9781450304191
    DOI:10.1145/1943403
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    Published: 13 February 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. deductive question answering
    2. domain-specific queries
    3. logical form
    4. natural-language database access
    5. theorem proving

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    • (2011)English Access to Structured DataProceedings of the 2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing10.1109/ICSC.2011.67(13-20)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2011

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