A knowledge-based system for generating informative responses to indirect database queries

The objective of this study is to develop a knowledge-base framework for generating cooperative answers to indirect queries. An indirect query can be considered as a nonstandard database query in which a user did not specify explicitly the information request. In a cooperative query answering system, a user's indirect query should be answered with an informative response, either an affirmative response or a negative response, which is generated on the basis of the inference of the user's information request and the reformulation of the users' indirect query. This paper presents methods for inferring users' intended actions, determining users' information requirements, and for automatically reformulating indirect queries into direct queries. The inference process is carried out on the basis of a user model, call user action model, as well as the query context. Two kinds of informative responses, i.e. affirmative responses and negative responses can be generated by a rule-based approach.