The Process of Question Answering -- A Computer Simulation of Cognition

Abstract

The processes of question answering are not a very well documented area of human intellectual activity, although our daily life is pervaded with it. According to Wendy Lehnert in a recent study on this subject this lack of insight is due to the fact that People are largely unconscious of the cognitive processes involved in answering a question, and are consequently insensitive to the complexities of those processes. But this may be true for almost any psychological activity. The maining of questions and their appropriate answers has been felt intuitively by cognitive scientist (and their predecessors) to be a conceptual swamp. Questions can be used for almost any purpose in communication: not only to obtain information or to request actions, but also to induce information (as in a Socratic dialogue, of. Collins, 1977), to change topic in a conversation and even to answer questions. One may therefore wonder whether questions form a proper conceptual category. The interpretation of a question may cover the complete area of discourse comprehension. But the production of an answer may involve even more: it may elicit any form of human cognitive processing. And, then, the truth value or appropriateness of the answer can be the subject of philosophic debate. Although Wendy Lehnert has put in her study some important restrictions to the nature of questions and to the conceptual domain they refer to (stories), she has by no means evaded the complexity