Notion Of Answer Research Articles

What Does a Query Answer Tell You? Informativeness of Query Answers for Knowledge Bases

Query answering for Knowledge Bases (KBs) amounts to extracting information from the various models of a KB, and presenting the user with an object that represents such information. In the vast majority of cases, this object consists of those tuples of constants that satisfy the query expression either in every model (certain answers) or in some model (possible answers). However, similarly to the case of incomplete databases, both these forms of answers are a lossy representation of all the knowledge inferable from the query and the queried KB. In this paper, we illustrate a formal framework to characterize the information that query answers for KBs are able to represent. As a first application of the framework, we study the informativeness of current query answering approaches, including the recently introduced partial answers. We then define a novel notion of answers, allowing repetition of variables across answer tuples. We show that these answers are capable of representing a meaningful form of information, and we also study their data complexity properties.

“Answers,” Assemblages, and Qualitative Research

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some historical developments of dialogue and how answers have been conceptualized within these historical discourses. The authors propose that answers be seen not as a final step in the research process but rather as an opening, an assemblage, a jar, or a call to transition into new forms of questions, new outlooks on methods, and new processes of thought. Finally, the renegotiation of the philosophical notion of answers that the authors will discuss in this article exemplifies potential for a renewed commitment to meaningful educational research.