Cooperative answers in database systems

A major concern of researchers who seek to improve human-computer communication involves how to move beyond literal interpretations of queries to a level of responsiveness that takes the user's misconceptions, expectations, desires, and interests into consideration. At Maryland, we are investigating how to better meet a user's needs within the framework of the cooperative answering system of Gal and Minker. We have been exploring how to use semantic information about the database to formulate coherent and informative answers. The work has two main thrusts: (1) the construction of a logic formula which embodies the content of a cooperative answer; and (2) the presentation of the logic formula to the user in a natural language form. The information that is available in a deductive database system for building cooperative answers includes integrity constraints, user constraints, the search tree for answers to the query, and false presuppositions that are present in the query. The basic cooperative answering theory of Gal and Minker forms the foundation of a cooperative answering system that integrates the new construction and presentation methods. This paper provides an overview of the cooperative answering strategies used in the CARMIN cooperative answering system, an ongoing research effort at Maryland. Section 2 gives some useful background definitions. Section 3 describes techniques for collecting cooperative logical formulae. Section 4 discusses which natural language generation techniques are useful for presenting the logic formula in natural language text. Section 5 presents a diagram of the system.