Yahoo! Inc.

Meryem Pinar Donmez

Ana-Maria Popescu

Hakan Ceylan

Ergin Elmacioglu

Techniques described herein assist users in satisfying complex information needs represented as long, detailed questions. A generalized search assistance framework for complex information needs is disclosed. Given a detailed question, the techniques enrich the original question with a set of related concepts. The types of questions handled are detailed, complex questions similar to the ones posted in Q&A portals. A generalized search assistance framework enriches complex detailed questions with topically related concepts. A basic pipeline represents an instantiation of such the search assistance framework. Given a detailed question, the pipeline relies on semantic and syntactic relationships in the detailed question in order to construct a set of related queries. The queries are issued to a commercial search engine and the retrieved results are processed by state-of-the-art document understanding techniques in order to retrieve important concepts. A final concept set for enriching the original question is then assembled.

Understanding and addressing complex information needs

Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for linking newsworthy events in a document to published content. One method includes an operation for receiving features by a classifier that is operable to determine a probability of the availability of news for a sentence. When the features are found in the sentence, the probability of the availability of news for the sentence increases, where the sentence includes one or more noun phrases and ends in a full stop. The classifier determines which sentences in a document are candidate sentences for being linked to news articles, and for each candidate sentence, the method includes an operation for finding an associated news article when there is an associated news article exceeding a relevance threshold. Further, the method includes operations for adding links in the document to the found associated news articles, and for displaying the document with the added links.

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Mersin, Turkey

Meryem Pinar Donmez