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Paraphrasing Questions Using Given and new information

Summary

The paper describes the paraphrase module of CO-OP (Kaplan 1979), a natural-language question-answering front end for databases aimed at casual users. Before the system searches the database, it restates the user's question in English so the user can catch misinterpretations. This is the only error check available to non-experts. The paraphraser takes the parser's syntactic tree and uses a transformational grammar instead of canned templates. It addresses two problems: ambiguous relative-clause attachment, and the risk of simply echoing the original wording. Drawing on the given/new distinction (Halliday, Krizkova, Firbas, Chafe), it divides a question into three parts. The given material becomes an "assuming that" clause that exposes the user's existential presuppositions. The new material is the bare wh-question plus the modifiers of the interrogative item. The design is domain-independent and needs no changes when the database changes. In development, the module was useful for spotting incorrect parses. However, no evaluation with real users is reported.

Key points

  • The paraphrase breaks a question into three components: given information, the questioner's lack of knowledge, and the "angle" (modifiers of the wh-word).
  • Reordering clauses removes attachment ambiguity. For example, the question about books on computers "dating from the '60s" yields distinct paraphrases for each reading.
  • The paper contrasts its approach with the template-based PLANES (Waltz 1978) and RENDEZVOUS (Codd 1978) paraphrasers. RENDEZVOUS uses FIND, EXIST and COUNT query headers. Templates are tied to a specific domain and interact unpredictably.
  • In CO-OP, only the lexicon and the database schema contain domain knowledge. The paraphraser itself is purely syntactic, and adding semantic paraphrasing (synonyms, idioms) is left for future work.
  • The work was done at the University of Pennsylvania, with support from an IBM Fellowship and NSF grants MCS 78-08401 and MCS 79-19171.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Machine translation · Natural language processing

Cited by

47 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 11 of them have a page here, 36 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{mckeown1983paraphrasing,
  title = {{Paraphrasing Questions Using Given and new information}},
  author = {McKeown, Kathleen R.},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1983},
  doi = {10.7916/d80c55kd},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7916/d80c55kd}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Akmajian, A. and Heny, F. 1975 An Introduction to the Principles of Transformational Syntax. Academic Press, New York, New York. find
  2. Chafe, W.L. 1977 Givennness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Points of View. In Li, C.N., Ed., Subject and Topic. Academic Press, New York, New York. find
  3. Codd, E.F. et al. 1978 Rendezvous Version 1: An Experimental English-Language Query Formulation System for Casual Users Paraphrasing Questions Using Given and N e w Information of Relational Data Bases. IBM Research Report RJ2144, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California. find
  4. Cullicover, P.W. 1976. Syntax. Academic Press, New York, New York. find
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  10. Halliday, M.A.K. 1967 Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English. Journal o f Linguisticsx 3. find
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  12. Joshi, A.K. 1979 Centered Logic: The Role of Entity Centered Sentence Representation in Natural Language Inferencing. in IJCAI Proceedings. find
  13. Kaplan, S.J. 1979 Cooperative Responses from a Portable Natural Language Data Base Query System. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. find
  14. McDonald, D.D. 1978 Subsequent Reference: Syntactic and Rhetorical Constraints. In TINLAP-2 Proceedings. find
  15. McKeown, K. 1979 Paraphrasing Using Given and New Information in a Question-answering System. Master's thesis. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. find
  16. Morgan, J.L. and Green, G.M. 1977 Pragmatics and Reading Comprehension. University of Illinois. find
  17. Prince, E. 1979 On the Given/New Distinction, CLS 15. find
  18. Simmons, R. and Slocum, J. 1972 Generating English Discourse from Semantic Networks, Communications o f the A CM 5 (10). find
  19. Waltz, D.L. 1978 An English Language Question Answering System for a Large Relational Data Base, CACM 21(7). Volume 9, N u m b e r 1, find

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