A question-answering system for word problems
The aim of the research reported here was to discover methods for building computer programs which can understand and communicate with people in a non-trivial subset of English. A computer program understands a subset of English if it accepts input sentences which are members of this subset, and answers questions based on information contained in the input. We describe in this paper a semantic theory of discourse, and utilize a first approximation to the analytical portion of this theory in the STUDENT question-answering system, a program which understands a subset of English in the sense defined above.