Baseball: An Automatic Question-Answerer

Introduction

In 1961, a group of researchers at MIT created a program that answered questions about baseball—a very specific “frame” for a text generator—such as “Where did each team play on July 1? or “Who has the most walks in the AL?” The scientists used a very small data set: the month, day, place, team and scores for each game in the American League for one year. The team detailed the workings of its simple-seeming program in a 200+ page book taht showed frame-based programs were by no means grammatically simplistic, even though their syntax and diction were limited by specific contexts. In the page displayed, you can find a diagram showing how the program brackets each word’s Part of Speech.

Additional Information

Label

Baseball: An Automatic Question-Answerer

Author

Bert Green, Alice Wolf, Carol Chomsky, and Kenneth Laughery

Original Publication Date

1963

New Publication Date

1963

Publisher

MIT Lincoln Library

Location

Butler Stacks

Case

7