Patent · US Active

System and method for providing answers to questions

US9703861B2 · kind B2 · utility

22Cited by
72References
25Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateMay 21, 2014
Grant dateJul 11, 2017
Priority date
Expiry dateAug 23, 2034

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06N5/02
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

System and method for providing answers to questions based on any corpus of data implements a method that generates 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, an output plurality of data structures is generated including candidate answers based upon the analyzing. Then, 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 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 based on the one or more query answers.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.