International Business Machines Corporation

Vinay R Dandin

John J Thomas

Aleksandr Evgenyevich Petrov

Avijit Chatterjee

Wanting Wang

Maxime Allard

Ricardo Balduino

A question-and-answer system directed to a specific domain optimally utilizes reference documents that are semantically complete for that domain. Semantic completeness of a document is assessed using quality control questions (provided by subject matter experts) applied to the Q&A system followed by analysis of the proposed answers. That analysis is carried out using a cogency module having a feedforward neural network which receives metadata features of the document such as document ownership, document priority, and document type. A domain-optimized corpus for the Q&A system is built by so assessing multiple documents in a document collection, and adding each reference document that is reported as being semantically complete to the domain-optimized corpus. Thereafter, the deep learning question-and-answer system can receive a natural language query from a user, find a responsive answer in the documents while applying the domain-optimized corpus, and provide that answer to the user.

Providing semantic completeness assessment with minimal domain-specific data

In a general purpose computer, a method of extracting snippets includes receiving textual content and a plurality of available topics, dividing the textual content into a plurality of snippets, converting each of the snippets to a vector, determining a distance between coadjacent snippets of the plurality of snippets in the textual content, determining an update to the plurality of snippets by merging each of the pairs of coadjacent snippets having a respective distance less than a second threshold, wherein an updated plurality of snippets includes merged snippets, generating a plurality of clusters from the updated plurality of snippets, each cluster associated with one topic selected from the plurality of available topics, and generating, for each of the snippets of the updated plurality of snippets, an affinity score for each of the clusters, each affinity score measuring an assignment strength of a given snippet to a given cluster, and a dominant topic among the at least one identified topic.

Incremental discovery of salient topics during customer interaction

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White Plains, NY, United States of America

Vinay R Dandin