Can a computer ask questions

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. (Pablo Picasso)

Is Picasso correct?

In the scientific literature the question if a computer can be made to ask questions is hardly discussed. However literature containing the following terms implicitly discusses this topic:

• Unsupervised learning
• Semi-supervised learning
• Active learning

Bibliography

0. [http://evanjones.ca/picasso.html]
1. Olsson (2009) : A literature survey of active machine learning in the context of natural language processing
2. Castro et al. (2008) : Active Learning
3. Zhu et al. (2007) : Humans Perform Semi-Supervised Classification Too
4. Zhu (2007) : Semi-supervised learning literature survey
5. Abou-Nasr (1992) : LBAQ: a pattern recognition neural network that learns by askingquestions