ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the symbolic procedures that humans execute when they answer complex questions. Psychologists are well equipped for measuring and manipulating variables, but their skills are rather underdeveloped when it comes to analyzing complex verbal protocols. Complex questions can be classified into different question categories. The chapter represents the form of conceptual graph structures. The symbolic procedure for a question category specifies the specific relational arcs that are followed when searching through a knowledge structure and constraints on those nodes that are accessed by this arc search procedure. The chapter offers an architecture for studying question answering. The architecture has five active processing components which together produce answers to a question. They include interpreting the question, selecting the appropriate question category, applying the selected question-answering procedure to relevant knowledge structures, articulating answers to the question, and evaluating the pragmatic goals of the speech participants.
