Adaptation Of Montague Grammar To The Requirements Of Question-Answering

In this paper a new version of Montague Grammar (MG) is developed, which is suitable for application in question-answering systems. The general framework for the definition of syntax and semantics described in Montague's 'Universal Grammar' is taken as starting-point. This framework provides an elegant way of defining an interpretation for a natural language (NL): by means of a syntax-directed translation into a logical language for which an interpretation is defined directly.In the question-answering system PHLIQA 1 [1] NL questions are interpreted by translating them into a logical language, the Data Base Language, for which an interpretation is defined by the data base. The similarity of this setup with the Montague framework is obvious. At first sight a QA system like this can be viewed as an application of MG. However, a closer look reveals that for this application MG has to be adapted in two ways.