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<Paper uid="H89-2009">
  <Title>ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS: PROCESSING MESSAGES AND QUERIES*</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="63" end_page="65" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CURRENT COVERAGE AND ISSUES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Current coverage on our training corpus of 174 VOYAGER inputs is 57%; that is, 100 of the utterances are correctly processed by VFE, PUNDIT and QTIP, and are sent to VOYAGER. We plan to increase coverage to 90%, and will then test the system on a more extensive corpus of spontaneous queries, collected by MIT. In addition, we plan to collect and analyze samples of task-orlented dialogue, in order to evaluate the system performance in providing a co-operative interface for interactive problem-solving.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One of the issues which we anticipate addressing is the interpretation of additional types of questions, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> short questions. For example, the notions of focus and open proposition (cf. \[Pri86\]) seem crucial to the interpretation of sequences such as Are there any bars around MIT? ... How about clubs? ... Restaurants?.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We also intend to further explore the relationship between the information structure of the question and the answer, in order to optimize the processing of the answer. For example, when VFE asks a clarification question such as Where are you?, we construct an open proposition whose variable is typed as a location 4.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We can therefore anticipate a cohesive response from the user in which the open proposition is satisfied by a location. A short response is maximally cohesive (MIT or At MIT), and we currently anticipate the possibility of this type of response, and call the parser first for an NP fragment, and then (if that fails) for a PP fragment. We could go farther by expecting certain types of prepositional phrases, namely location expressions (e.g. By subway would be an incoherent response). For the long response (I am at MIT), we may expect the focus to be accented, and the material corresponding to the open proposition to be de-accented. Such expectations should prove useful for speech recognition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> These are not only important research issues, but we believe them to have a direct bearing on the ultimate performance of the system, in terms of user satisfaction and time to accurately complete the task.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 4Intultively, an open proposition is an expression containing an unbound variable.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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