From search engines to question-answering systems: The problems of world knowledge, relevance, deduction, and precisiation

Abstract

Existing search engines, with Google at the top, have many truly remarkable capabilities. Furthermore, constant progress is being made in improving their performance. But what is not widely recognized is that there is a basic capability which existing search engines do not have: deduction capability - the capability to synthesize an answer to a query by drawing on bodies of information which reside in various parts of the knowledge base. By definition, a question-answering system, or a Q/A system for short, is a system which has deduction capability. Can a search engine be upgraded to a question-answering system through the use of existing tools - tools which are based on bivalent logic and probability theory? A view which is articulated in the following is that the answer is: no.