International Business Machines Corporation

Suneil H Berajawala

David Deidou Taieb

William Graham O'Keeffe

Ashok Kumar

Anthony Tom Levas

Kevin B Haverlock

Siddharth A Patwardhan

Software that answers questions asked of question answering systems, by performing the following steps: (i) identifying a hierarchy of question and answer pairs, where a first answer paired to a first question in the hierarchy of question and answer pairs includes at least a second answer paired to a second question in the hierarchy of question and answer pairs; (ii) receiving, by a question answering system, an input question from a first user; (iii) identifying first user contextual information pertaining to the first user; and (iv) answering the input question, by the question answering system, based, at least in part, on the hierarchy of question and answer pairs and the first user contextual information.

Determining answers to questions using a hierarchy of question and answer pairs

Collaborative annotation of a document. A GUI is generated by a host computer that displays a document to annotate. The GUI is transmitted by the host computer to a plurality of client computers. Real time communication modes are established by the host computer between the client computers, each including communication channels between all the client computers. The host computer receives annotations entered into the GUIs at the client computers, each annotation identifying a span of words in the document to annotate and including an associated annotation type. The host computer updates the GUI to include for display the received annotations and inter-rater agreement statistics indicating the level of agreement between annotations received from each client computer and annotations received from the other client computers. The updated GUI is then transmitted by the host computer to the plurality of client computers.

Collaborative creation of annotation training data

Mechanisms are provided, in a Question and Answer (QA) system, for identifying a related previously processed question. A first question is processed by the QA system to generate an answer to the first question and a supporting evidence passage that supports the answer to the first question being a correct answer to the first question. The QA system performs a lookup operation in a question repository based on an identifier of the supporting evidence passage to identify an entry corresponding to a previously processed question, different than the first question, that previously had an answer generated based on the supporting evidence passage. The QA system returns the previously processed question and the answer to the first question to a submitter of the first question.

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Lowell, MA, United States of America

Suneil H Berajawala