Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Hassan Sajjad

Michael Gamon

Patrick Pantel

A search system that automatically generates questions to refine an underspecified query. The system may generate questions even for queries against a database that contains unstructured textual descriptions of items, allowing the system to operate on a database of items that can be constructed inexpensively. The system extracts from the unstructured text combinations of words that may serve as a set of attribute values. The system uses a classifier to filter out attribute values from the set that would generate unanswerable questions. The remaining attribute values are ranked on their ability to narrow the search results and the highest ranking attribute value is used to generate a question to the user who submitted the query. The response to the question narrows the search results, and the process can be repeated iteratively until the search results are sufficiently narrow.

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Stuttgart, Germany

Hassan Sajjad