Abstract

The shortcomings of traditional Information Retrieval are most evident when users require exact information rather than relevant documents. This practical need is pushing the research com- munity towards systems that can exactly pinpoint those parts of documents that contain the information requested. Answer Extrac- tion (AE) systems aim to satisfy this need. This paper presents one such system (ExtrAns) which works by transforming documents and queries into a semantic representation called Minimal Logical Form (MLF) and derives the answers by logical proof from the documents. MLFs use underspecification to overcome the problems associated with a complete semantic representation and offer the possibility of monotonic, non-destructive extension.