International Business Machines Corporation

Nirav P Desai

Stephen Arthur Boxwell

Stanley John Vernier

Timothy A Bishop

Benjamin L Brumfield

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager identifies training entities in a training question answer pair and identifies database paths a database that link the training entities. The knowledge manager then generates a generalized query based upon the identified database paths. In addition, the knowledge manager generates a generalized syntactic pattern based upon syntactic relationships between the training entities in the training question answer pair. When the knowledge manager receives a question and matches the syntactic pattern of the received question to the generalized syntactic pattern, the knowledge manager generates a custom query from the generalized query and queries the database using the custom query.

Mapping questions to complex database lookups using synthetic events

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager identifies training entities in a training question answer pair and identifies multiple database paths a database that link the training entities. The knowledge manager then generates multiple generalized queries based upon the identified multiple database paths and assigns query scores to the multiple generalized queries. In addition, the knowledge manager generates a generalized syntactic pattern based upon syntactic relationships between the training entities in the training question answer pair. When the knowledge manager receives a question and matches the syntactic pattern of the received question to the generalized syntactic pattern, the knowledge manager generates custom queries from the generalized queries and queries the database using the custom queries. The knowledge manager, in turn, scores answers generated from the custom queries based upon the custom queries' corresponding query scores.

Scoring automatically generated language patterns for questions using synthetic events

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager matches a question to multiple natural language contexts that each correspond to relations associated with entities in a structured resource. The knowledge manager identifies database queries corresponding to the multiple natural language contexts and assigns priority scores to the database queries based upon their relative specificity. In turn, the knowledge manager invokes one of the database queries based upon the assigned priority scores.

Using priority scores for iterative precision reduction in structured lookups for questions

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager receives a question and selects candidate answers based upon a lexical answer type included in the question. The knowledge manager evaluates the candidate answers against conditions detected in the question and generates condition fulfillment scores accordingly. In turn, the knowledge manager ranks the candidate answers based upon the corresponding condition fulfillment scores.

Identification and evaluation of lexical answer type conditions in a question to generate correct answers

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager analyzes a corpus of documents based upon relations corresponding to entities in a structured resource and constructs a natural language context associated with a set of the relations. The knowledge manager maps the natural language context to a database query and, in turn, invokes the database query when the knowledge manager matches a question to the natural language context.

Using synthetic events to identify complex relation lookups

One or more words are received. A set of frequency of occurrence values of the received word(s) within a set of domain tables is determined. A domain table in the set of domain tables is associated to the received word(s), based on the set of frequency of occurrence values meeting a threshold value. A word-sense of the received word(s) is determined based on a corresponding word-sense in the associated domain table and/or corresponding domain dictionary.

Identifying word-senses based on linguistic variations

An approach is provided in which a knowledge manager analyzes parent/child hierarchies between semi-structured items included in a semi-structured resource. The knowledge manager generates synthetic events based upon the parent/child hierarchy analysis and creates a structured resource utilizing the synthetic events. In one embodiment, the structured resource includes structured resource entries, which include a first semi-structured item, a second semi-structured item, and one of the synthetic events. In turn, the knowledge manager queries the structured resource based upon a question received from a user interface.

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Nirav P Desai