A net structure for semantic information storage, deduction and retrieval

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. 1. Introduction In order to develop machines capable of "understanding" natural language, it is extremely valuable, if not necessary, to design a method of organizing a corpus of data to facilitate the storage and retrieval of information on many subjects, some in depth, some in breadth; to facilitate the storage, retrieval and use of the many complex relationships among real-world concepts; to facilitate the storage, retrieval and use of information which tells how other information in the corpus may be used to further explicate implied relationships among concepts; and to facilitate the identification from the vast corpus of data of those pieces of information most directly relevant to any given topic. This paper describes a data structure (MENS) and procedures for manipulating it The research reported herein was partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (GJ-583) and partially by USAF Proj.