An Efficient Easily Adaptable System for Interpreting Natural Language Queries

This paper gives an overall account of a prototype natural language question answering system, called Chat-80. Chat-80 has been designed to be both efficient and easily adaptable to a variety of applications. The system is implemented entirely in Prolog, a programming language based on logic. With the aid of a logic-based grammar formalism called extraposition grammars, Chat-80 translates English questions into the Prolog subset of logic. The resulting logical expression is then transformed by a planning algorithm into efficient Prolog, cf. "query optimisation" in a relational database. Finally, the Prolog form is executed to yield the answer. On a domain of world geography, most questions within the English subset are answered in well under one second, including relatively complex queries.