Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language

In this chapter we continue the linguistic turn that we initiate in the previous one by addressing pragmatic issues. Here we deal squarely with linguistic issues, that is, with questions instead of queries. We can do this because one of the appeals of the concept of GQ is that it has been widely used in linguistic analysis. In particular, the notion of interrogative quantifier has been proposed and analyzed ([94, 20, 42, 35]. Here, we build on such analysis to show how QLGQ can be used to formalize questions, thus providing a solid formal framework for work in Question Answering (henceforth QA).

We first provide a (very brief) overview of QA, in order to make the material as self-contained as possible. We then show in section 8.3 how GQs have been used by linguists for the formal analysis of natural language. We then show how QLGQ can be used to support QA. The approach presented here, however, opens up more questions than it answers, and hence we close the chapter with a detailed discussion of our motivation, and where to go from here.