Questions as information types

Questions as information types

This paper argues that there is an important role to be played by questions in logic, both semantically and proof-theoretically. Semantically, we show that, by generalizing the classical notion of entailment to questions, we can capture not only the standard relation of logical consequence, which concerns specific pieces of information, but also the relation of logical dependency, which concern...

Annotating Question Types for Consumer Health Questions

This paper presents a question classification scheme and a corresponding annotated corpus of consumer health questions. While most medical question classification methods have targeted medical professionals, the 13 question types we present are targeted toward disease questions posed by consumers. The corpus consists of 1,467 consumer-generated requests for disease information, containing a tot...

Questions and Information Systems

The handling of questions in a computational system falls into one of the more obvious convergences of natural language processing and human factors. The relationship of a user to an information system is fundamentally that of inquiring; at the same time, questions are asked in many different forms other than the simply interrogative, and much contextual knowledge must be maintained in order to...

Questions and Information: Contrasting Metaphors

Extracting Information and Answering Questions

To move beyond current keyword-based approaches to document retrieval, we need to provide the user with a range of technologies for obtaining information and answering questions. One of these is information extraction (IE), which has the potential, for a limited range of requests, to provide more focused and comprehensive responses. IE has been constrained by limitations on the performance of n...