System and method for providing answers to questions
US8275803B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | May 14, 2008 |
| Grant date | Sep 25, 2012 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Nov 12, 2029 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06N5/02
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A system, method and computer program product for providing answers to questions based on any corpus of data. The method facilitates generating a number of candidate passages from the corpus that answer an input query, and finds the correct resulting answer by collecting supporting evidence from the multiple passages. By analyzing all retrieved passages and that passage's metadata in parallel, there is generated an output plurality of data structures including candidate answers based upon the analyzing. Then, by each of a plurality of parallel operating modules, supporting passage retrieval operations are performed upon the set of candidate answers, and for each candidate answer, the data corpus is traversed to find those passages having candidate answer in addition to query terms. All candidate answers are automatically scored causing the supporting passages by a plurality of scoring modules, each producing a module score. The modules scores are processed to determine one or more query answers; and, a query response is generated for delivery to a user based on the one or more query answers.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.