Ghosts in the Machine: An AI Treatment of Medieval History

This paper gives a genera l ized overview of RESEDA, an i n t e r a c t i v e quest ion answering system designed p r i m a r i l y f o r use by h i s t o r i a n s . I t s data base cons is ts o f h i s t o r i c a l i n f o rma t i on , which a t temps to descr ibe the a t t i t u d e s , p o l i t i c a l , r e l i gious and i n t e r p e r s o n a l , of the ch ie f characters of the pe r i od . Question answering is done by search of the data base and by in ference on the in format i o n t h e r e i n . The d i f f i c u l t i e s o f represent ing t h i s type of data and of f o rmu la t i ng in ference ru les dea l ing w i t h human mot iva t ions and a t t i t u d e s is also d iscussed.