Developing a Natural Language Question Answering System as a Logic Program

This book presents the merging of state-of-the-art techniques in computational linguistic and logic programming with the practical experience of knowledge engineering and domain development management up to overall building of question answering business. The developed technique is illustrated with software applications with millions of users (e.g. US taxpayers). The text addresses the issues in natural language processing in a comprehensive manner: from syntactical to pragmatic analyses, from formal models of language and its understanding to the specifics of end user presentation. It contains a thorough manual on coding the natural language processing engine, as well as a variety of question answering domains. World knowledge and commonsense ontology are represented for domains of various natures, from industrial to financial and from psychological to medical.