Knowledge Representation and Sense Disambiguation for Interrogatives in E-HowNet

In order to train machines to ‘understand’ natural language, we propose a meaning representation mechanism called E-HowNet to encode lexical senses. In this paper, we take interrogatives as examples to demonstrate the mechanisms of semantic representation and composition of interrogative constructions under the framework of E-HowNet. We classify the interrogative words into five classes according to their query types, and represent each type of interrogatives with fine-grained features and operators. The process of semantic composition and the difficulties of representation, such as word sense disambiguation, are addressed. Finally, machine understanding is tested by showing how machines derive the same deep semantic structure for synonymous sentences with different surface structures.