In Meltzer, Bernard and Donald Michie (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh University Press.

In Meltzer, Bernard and Donald Michie (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 5. Edinburgh University Press.

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.

"A computer program has been written which can formulate hypotheses from a given set of scientific data. The data consist of the mass spectrum and the empirical formula of an organic chemical compound. The hypotheses which are produced describe molecular structures which are plausible explanations of the data. The hypotheses are generated systematically within the program's theory of chemical stability and within limiting constraints which are inferred from the data by heuristic rules. The program excludes hypotheses inconsistent with the data and lists its candidate explanatory hypotheses in order of decreasing plausibility. The computer program is heuristic in that it searches for plausible hypotheses in a small subset of the total hypothesis space according to heuristic rules learned from chemists."In Meltzer, B., Michie, D., and Swann, M. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 4, pp. 209-254. Edinburgh University Press

Science 166:178-192

In Meltzer, Bernard and Donald Michie (Eds.). Machine Intelligence 5, pp. 78-98. Edinburgh University Press.

Tech.Rep.MAC-TR-59, AI Laboratory, Massachusetts InstituteofTechnology.

In Michie, Donald (Ed.), Machine Intelligence 3. Edinburgh University Press

AFIPS Conference Proceedings 88,

In Proc. IRIA Symposium on Automatic Demonstration, pp. 276–310.