METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR IDENTIFIYING SIMILAR QUESTIONS IN A CONSULTATION SYSTEM

• US 20130297625A1
• Filed: 05/04/2012
• Published: 11/07/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 05/04/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Pearl.com LLC (JustAnswer LLC)
• Original Assignee: Pearl.com LLC (JustAnswer LLC)
• Inventors: Bierner, Gann, Cooper, Edwin
• Granted Patent: US 9,646,079 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/754
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/33 Querying
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

Embodiments of the present invention further provide systems and methods for automatically identifying questions on topics similar to a newly submitted question to an online the consultation system.

Claims

4-1. The method of claim 1, wherein the similar questions is made available to subscription users.

8. A topic extraction apparatus in an online consultation system, the apparatus comprising:

an linguistic analysis engine for extracting candidate topics from the newly submitted question;

a conditional logic engine for applying a first filter to identify the candidate topics with an affinity to the question category and a second filter to identify the candidate topics with an affinity to the newly submitted question; and

a scoring engine for identifying previously submitted questions including the filtered candidate topics as similar questions.

9. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium having embodied thereon instructions which when executed by at least one processor, causes a machine to perform operations comprising:

receiving a newly submitted question, the question being associated with a given category;

extracting candidate topics from the newly submitted question;

applying a first filter to identify the candidate topics with an affinity to the question category;

applying a second filter to identify the candidate topics with an affinity to the newly submitted question;

identifying previously submitted questions including the filtered candidate topics as similar questions; and

identifying previously submitted questions including the filtered candidate topics as similar questions.