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<Paper uid="P88-1006">
  <Title>A General Computational Treatment of Comparatives for Natural Language Question Answering</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We discuss the techniques we have developed and implemented for the cross-categorial treatment of comparatives in TELl, a natural language question-answering system that's transportable among both application domains and types of backend retrieval systems. For purposes of illustration, we shall consider the example sentences &amp;quot;List the cars at least 20 inches more than twice as long as the Century is wide&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Have any US companies made at least 3 more large cars than Buick?&amp;quot; Issues to be considered include comparative inflections, left recursion and other forms of nesting, extraposition of comparative complements, ellipsis, the wh element &amp;quot;how', and the translation of normalized parse trees into logical form.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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