Although the approaches for solving the two cases mentioned above can be successful to some degree, actually, there are not many questions like these. Many of the actual questions are asking for text reading comprehension or recognition of conversation, as in the example below.
Choose the most appropriate one for of the following conversation.
Zack: It's already ten. We'd better be going when Bob comes back from the restroom. Shall we split the bill equally?
Koji: I'd rather not do that. I ate and drank a lot more than you two. I think I should pay more.
Zack:
Koji: That sounds fair.
① Calm down. You don't have to get so excited.
② How about asking for a discount?
③ I wish I'd brought the coupon from the magazine.
④ Should we ask for separate checks?
(2009 Academic Year Main Examination: English)
It is trivial to find the answer if we have common sense about restaurants (of course the answer is choice 4). However, why is no.4 the correct answer? A logical explanation is not possible for this question, and it can only be said “Because it is natural”.
This problem does not require special reading comprehension capability, but it is asking whether the text written in English is recognized correctly. “Recognized correctly” here means that it is understood in the same way as the mother language, and it also includes “knowing common sense of the society”. Though it is testing the comprehension on the premise of what every human would understand, it is a difficult problem for a computer to solve, as a computer cannot recognize “what every human would understand”.
Question analysis up until now, English questions are often relying on human common sense like this, an effective method to answer these types of questions has not been found yet. Questions of common sense are known to be very difficult in the research of artificial intelligence up until now, and how this problem can be avoided has been one of the key points in a lot of current research. In this project, we study a scheme for recognition of common sense questions though within the limited scope of problems asked in examinations. We advance the analysis in regards to developing mechanisms and operations that are capable of answering examination questions that rely on understanding the meaning and common sense.