Discussion

This brief overview of a few of the questions and answers in the evaluation phase of my research demonstrates the amount of thought which went into the process in an attempt to not inadvertently bias the results. While ISAAC had to be ``helped'' in certain ways in order to answer the questions, this help was not a consequence of ISAAC not being a good comprehender. Rather, ISAAC was not initially designed to be a question answering system. So, its ability to understand question forms is somewhat limited. Also, ISAAC was never designed to speak to humans in English. This means that its ability to produce English is nonexistent. This should not be interpreted to mean that ISAAC is less of a reader as a result. Rather, the system is simply being helped to do something it was not designed to do in order to demonstrate its ability on what it was designed to accomplish.