A categorization of KR&R methods for requirement analysis of a query answering knowledge base

Our long-term goal is to build a query answering system that can answer questions on a wide variety of topics and explain the answers. In such a situation, a designer faces the challenge of how to specify the KR&R requirements that are needed to answer questions. In this paper, we introduce a categorization of KR&R methods, and apply it to specifying the requirements for answering questions in six different domains: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Environmental Science, Microeconomics, and U.S. Government & Politics. Drawing from the corpus of about 500 questions that we analyzed, we consider an example question in each domain and show the analytical process that we used to derive the requirements in terms of the KR&R categorization. We analyze the effectiveness of the current KR&R categorization, and identify directions for future work suggesting how this categorization can be further evolved by community participation.