# Functorial Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.07408 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07408/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [On Meta-Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06562/) (2023)
- [How to make qubits speak](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06776/) (2021)
- [Higher-Order DisCoCat (Peirce-Lambek-Montague semantics)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17813/) (2023)
- [Functorial Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14411/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distributional compositional (DisCo) models are functors that compute the meaning of a sentence from the meaning of its words. We show that DisCo models in the category of sets and relations correspond precisely to relational databases. As a consequence, we get complexity-theoretic reductions from semantics and entailment of a fragment of natural language to evaluation and containment of conjunctive queries, respectively. Finally, we define question answering as an NP-complete problem.