Inference Web: Portable and Sharable Explanations for Question Answering

Knowledge Systems Laboratory
Stanford University

Abstract: Inference Web: Portable and Shareable Explanations for Question Answering

The World Wide Web lacks support for explaining information provenance. When web applications return results, many users do not know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how reliable the source was, what information was looked up versus derived, and if something was derived, how it was derived. In this paper we introduce the Inference Web (IW) that addresses the problems of opaque query answers by providing sharable, combinable, and distributed explanations. The explanations include information concerning where answers came from and how they were deduced (or retrieved). The IW solution includes: an extensible registry containing details on information sources and reasoners, a portable proof specification, and an explanation browser.

Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva `` Inference Web: Portable and Shareable Explanations for Question Answering ''. In the Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Workshop on New Directions for Question Answering. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. March 2003. abstract . A slightly expanded and updated version is available at abstract.

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