[Attempto] RACE Web Service problem

[Kaarel Kaljurand]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Joshua TAYLOR <tayloj at cs.rpi.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not a RACE/ACE developer, but the question looked interesting.
> Using the RACE Webclient, the following works:
>
>
> Axioms: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX Coordinate10.
> Query: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX what?
> Parameters: si st ot sdt dodt iodt sti aux fpo
> The following minimal subsets of the axioms answer the query:
>    * Subset 1
>          o 1: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX Coordinate10.
>          o Prolog Axiom w4: If there are named non-human objects then
> the question "who" can be answered.
>
>
> Which is similar to your query, rather than 10, has Coordinate10. (The
> syntax of the question was a bit different, too.)

Yes, while "10" is a number, "Coordinate10" is a proper name.
It might make sense to treat them in the same way in the
context of such queries though.

> From this I
> wondered if the problem was with number related things, so I went on
> to:
>
> Axioms: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX 10 points.
> Query: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX what?
> Parameters: si st ot sdt dodt iodt sti aux fpo
> The following minimal subsets of the axioms answer the query:
>    * Subset 1
>          o 1: Resource1 v:hasCoordinateX 10 points.
>          o Prolog Axiom w3: If there are countable non-human objects
> then the question "who" can be answered.
>
>
> The query is still answered here.

Yes. "10 points" is a noun phrase, where "10" is the specifier.
This query is similar to:

John owns 3 cars. What does John own?

Clearly, it makes sense for RACE to answer this by pointing
to the axiom "John owns 3 cars.".

> Wondering whether other kinds of
> arithmetic terms [1] might work, I also tried: "10", [10], (10), but
> none worked. Now I'm curious: does RACE support queries whose answers
> are arithmetic terms? The ACE syntax for questions [2] doesn't show
> any such examples.

Arithmetic terms (incl. simple numbers) are treated as normal NPs,
i.e. you can write sentences like:

Resource1 has-coordinate-pair [1, 2].

But RACE does not support them (i.e. sentences that contain them)
as possible answers, i.e. one does not get an answer to:

Resource1 has-coordinate-pair what?

It might make sense to change this though...

--
kaarel