COGEX: a logic prover for question answering

Recent TREC results have demonstrated the need for deeper text understanding methods. This paper introduces the idea of automated reasoning applied to question answering and shows the feasibility of integrating a logic prover into a Question Answering system. The approach is to transform questions and answer passages into logic representations. World knowledge axioms as well as linguistic axioms are supplied to the prover which renders a deep understanding of the relationship between question text and answer text. Moreover, the trace of the proofs provide answer justifications. The results show that the prover boosts the performance of the QA system on TREC questions by 30%.