KR 2019 homework: overall task

The overall project built during the three homeworks is a small and simple system for understanding natural language (English): more concretely, a question answering system.

For example, given a text "John is a father of Mike. Mike is a father of Pete." your system should answer questions like "Is John male?" as "yes", "Who is a grandfather of Pete?" as "John" and "Is Mike female?" as "no".

Our domain: what kinds of knowledge we care about

We will focus on a limited domain of human knowledge and limited textual input and questions: basic properties of and relations between people.

Properties can be thought of as predicates like male(john), female(mary), alive(mary), has_children(mary) which can be also negated, like -female(john).

Relations can be thought of as predicates like father(john,mike), mother(mary,mike), husband(john,margaret) which can also be negated, like -father(john,margaret).

You do not have to manage to answer really complex questions about people, but the more you manage, the better.

Think of the properties as either

• strict: male, female, alive, dead, has children, has a Ph.D, born in 2010, etc.
• or fuzzy: boy, girl, rich, poor, famous, etc.

Think also, that we are not always sure of the answer. It is enough to broadly classify our confidence (if we have any grounds for the answer at all) as:

• certainly yes
• likely
• unlikely
• certainly not

==