Advantages of a Transformational Grammar for Question Answering

A number of researchers in ar t i f ic ia l intel l igence, for example, Woods(1975, p.88 f f . ), have asserted that transformat ional grammars are not a satisfactory basis on which to construct natural language understanding systems, pr imari ly because of eff ic iency considerations. The evidence for such a claim is by no means strong, Pe t r i ck (1976) , and it can be argued that transfer of new theoretical insights into a language understanding system based on transformational grammar is fac i l i tated, Plath( 1973). This note shows that a transformat iona l parser can also s impl i fy problems of relat ing canonical representations of queries to data base representations.