A Terminological Simplification Transformation for Natural Language Question-Answering Systems

A new me thod is p r e s e n t e d for s impl i fy ing t h e l o g i c a l e x p r e s s i o n s u s e d to r e p r e s e n t u t t e r a n c e m e a n ing in a n a t u r a l l a n g u a g e sys t em. 1 This s i m p l i f i c a t i o n m e t h o d u t i l i z e s t he e n c o d e d knowledge a nd t h e l imi t ed i n f e r e n c e m a k i n g c a p a b i l i t y of a t a x o n o m i c k n o w l e d g e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s y s t e m to r e d u c e t h e c o n s t i t u e n t s t r u c t u r e of l o g i c a l e x p r e s s i o n s . The s p e c i f i c a p p l i c a t i o n is to t h e p r ob l e m of mapp ing e x p r e s s i o n s of t h e mean ing r e p r e s e n t a t i o n l a n g u a g e to a d a t a b a s e l a n g u a g e c a p a b l e of r e t r i e v i n g a c t u a l r e s p o n s e s . P a r t i c u l a r a c c o u n t is t a k e n of t h e m o d e l t h e o r e t i c a s p e c t s of t h i s p rob lem.