Please download the dossier by clicking on the dossier button x
×

Generating secondary questions in an introspective question answering system

  • US 10,614,725 B2
  • Filed: 09/11/2012
  • Issued: 04/07/2020
  • Est. Priority Date: 09/11/2012
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
Patent Images

1. A computerized device, comprising:

  • a question-answer system comprising a processor running software for performing a plurality of question answering processes and a corpus of data;

    a receiver receiving a first question into the question-answer system; and

    a network interface connected to external sources comprising a community of human respondents;

    said processor;

    comparing the first question to the corpus of data;

    generating candidate answers for the first question posed to the question-answer system, the candidate answers for the first question being generated from the corpus of data;

    determining a confidence score for each of the candidate answers based on evidence from the corpus of data used to generate the candidate answers, the determining a confidence score further comprises assigning an evidence score to the evidence based on how well the evidence matches the first question, wherein the evidence comprises good evidence, marginal evidence, and bad evidence;

    identifying information to supplement the marginal evidence, the information improves the confidence scores for the candidate answers to the first question;

    generating a plurality of hypotheses concerning the information that supplements the marginal evidence and improves the confidence scores for the candidate answers to the first question;

    generating the at least one secondary question based on each hypothesis of the plurality of hypotheses concerning the information that supplements the marginal evidence and improves the confidence scores for the candidate answers to the first question, an answer to the at least one secondary question improving the ability of the question-answer system to understand and evaluate evidence associated with the candidate answers to the first question;

    ranking the hypotheses based on relative utility to determine an order in which to output the at least one secondary question to the external sources;

    outputting the at least one secondary question to the external sources using the network interface;

    receiving responses to the at least one secondary question from the external sources using the network interface;

    validating the responses to the at least one secondary question to extract a piece of data, fact, syntactical relationship, grammatical relationship, logical rule, or taxonomy rule that improves the confidence scores for the candidate answers to the first question, the validating comprises validating that the responses are supported by a threshold number of external sources; and

    adding the piece of data, fact, syntactical relationship, grammatical relationship, logical rule, or taxonomy rule extracted from responses to the at least one secondary question to the corpus of data.

View all claims
  • 0 Assignments
Timeline View
Assignment View
    ×
    ×