This paper describes a theory formation system which can discover a partial axiomization of a data base represented as extensionally defined binary relations.- The system first discovers all possible intensional definitions of each binary relation in terms of the others. It then determines a minimal set of these relations from which the others can be defined. It then attempts to discover all the ways the relations of this minimal set can interact with each other, thus generating a set of inference rules. Although the system was originally designed to explore automatic techniques for theory construction for question-answering systems, it is currently being expanded to function as a symbiotic system to help social scientists explore certain kinds of data bases.In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.

This paper describes a data structure, MENS (MEmory Net Structure), that is useful for storing semantic information stemming from a natural language, and a system, MENTAL (MEmory Net That Answers and Learns) that interacts with a user (human or program), stores information into and retrieves information from MENS and interprets some information in MENS as rules telling it how to deduce new information from what is already stored. MENTAL can be used as a guestion-answering system with formatted input/output, as a vehicle for experimenting with various theories of semantic structures or as the memory management portion of a natural language question-answering system.See also:U. Wisconsin Technical Report 109 versionScanned, non-OCR, versionIn IJCAI-71: INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. British Computer Society, London, pp. 512-523.

See also: ACM Digital Library.CACM 13 (1):15-30

A question-answering system. Tech. Note 15, AI Group, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif.

This paper shows how a question -answering system can be constructed using first -order logic as its language and a resolution -type theorem -prover as its deductive mechanism. A working computer -program, Q A3, based on these ideas is described. The performance of the program compares favorably with several other general question -answering systems.

Fall Joint Computer Conference 33:457-471

In Proc. 23rd ACM National Conference.

PhD. dissertation, Harvard University, August 1967. Reprinted as a volume in the series Outstanding Dissertations in the Computer Sciences, New York: Garland Publishing, 1979

American Documentation 15:196— 204.

Reprinted in Marvin Minsky (ed), Semantic Information Processing, pp. 354-402, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.