International Business Machines Corporation

Sai Prathyusha Peddi

Corville O Allen

Joseph N Kozhaya

Christopher Michael Madison

Mary Swift

James William Murdock, Iv

Christopher Munjal Nolan

Lin Pan

Nisarga Markandaiah

Eun Ha

Chung-Wei Hang

Kazi Hasan

Systems and methods for generating answers to questions. One method includes receiving a question having question terms; identifying candidate answers to the question having answer terms; searching data sources to determine passages including either a question term or an answer term in the candidate answer; scoring the passages for candidate answers using a scoring mechanism, the scoring mechanism computing a first degree of relevance of the passage to the question terms, computing a second degree of relevance of the passage to the answer terms of one of the candidate answers, and determining a score for the passage by combining the first degree of relevance and the second degree of relevance; ranking candidate answers to the question based on the scores associated with the scoring each of the passages for each of the candidate answers; and providing an answer to the question based on ranking of the candidate answers.

Supporting evidence retrieval for complex answers

According to one exemplary embodiment, a method for dynamically defining topics from content objects used to answer a question in a question answering system is provided. The method may include receiving the content objects. The method may include identifying the topics within the received content objects. The method may include generating a graph based on the identified plurality of topics, whereby nodes map to the topics. The method may include calculating edge weights associated with each edge based on semantic relations associated with the topics. The method may include determining if the calculated edge weight associated an edge exceeds a threshold value. The method may include generating a combination topic based on determining that the edge weight associated with the edge exceeds the threshold value.

Defining dynamic topic structures for topic oriented question answer systems

According to one exemplary embodiment, a method for generating an answer in a question answering system is provided. The method may include receiving a question. The method may also include identifying a candidate answer from a corpus. The method may then include determining a plurality of sentences based on the identified candidate answer. The method may further include calculating a similarity value for each sentence within the plurality of sentences based on comparing the plurality of sentences to the candidate answer and the received question. The method may also include identifying at least one sentence within the plurality of sentences with a calculated similarity value that exceeds a threshold value. The method may then include generating the answer based on the candidate answer and the identified at least one sentence.

Generating answers from concept-based representation of a topic oriented pipeline

According to one exemplary embodiment, a method for generating an answer in a question answering system is provided. The method may include receiving a question. The method may also include identifying a candidate answer from a corpus. The method may then include determining a plurality of sentences based on the identified candidate answer. The method may further include calculating a similarity value for each sentence within the plurality of sentences based on comparing the plurality of sentences to the candidate answer and the received question. The method may also include identifying at least one sentence within the plurality of sentences with a calculated similarity value that exceeds a threshold value. The method may then include presenting the answer, whereby the answer comprises the plurality of sentences, the candidate answer, and metadata.

Presenting answers from concept-based representation of a topic oriented pipeline

Growing community of inventors

Cary, NC, United States of America

Sai Prathyusha Peddi