This encourages us to build a semantic parser that produces an explicit representation of what the question is asking, if we want to make quantitative progress on the question set.
while it is not hard to formalize the semantics: it is not clear how to devise a compositional transformation from the original question to the formal semantics, since the meaning is dispersed throughout the discourse, such that neither the maximization nor the minimization can be locally derived from some subtree of the syntactic structure.