Knowledge-Driven Text Interpretation and Question-Answering: Some Current Activities at Boeing Mathematics and Computing Technology

At Boeing, we are currently developing methods for knowledge-driven text interpretation and questionanswering, based on matching analyzed input text against strong, background expectations from a knowledge-base (Clark et al. 2002). Our goal is to be able to answer questions about text which goes beyond facts explicitly stated in the text. For example, the statement (1) “China launched a meterological satellite into orbit Wednesday ” suggests that (among other things) there was a rocket launch; China probably owns the satellite; the satellite is for monitoring weather; the orbit is around Earth; etc., although none of these facts are explicit in the text. Our approach is based on (a) building representations of prototypical scenarios, e.g., launching a satellite, in a large knowledge-base, (b) extracting fragments of informatio