System and method for finding the most likely answer to a natural language question
First Claim
1. A method for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents comprising the steps of:
- extracting scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question;
scoring the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and
presenting the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer, wherein one or more of said steps are performed by a hardware device.
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Abstract
Automated question answering is disclosed that relates to the selection of an answer to a question from a pool of potential answers which are manually or automatically extracted from a large collection of textual documents. The a feature extraction component, a feature combination component, an answer selection component, and an answer presentation component, among others, are included. The input to the system is a set of one or more natural language questions and a collection of textual document. The output is a (possibly ranked) set of factual answers to the questions, these answers being extracted from the document collection.
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Citations
11 Claims
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1. A method for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents comprising the steps of:
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extracting scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; scoring the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and presenting the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer, wherein one or more of said steps are performed by a hardware device. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5)
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6. A system for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents, comprising:
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a memory; and at least one processor, coupled to the memory, operative to; extract scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; score the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and present the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer. - View Dependent Claims (7, 8, 9, 10)
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11. An article of manufacture for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents, comprising a tangible machine readable recordable storage medium containing one or more programs which when executed implement the steps of:
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extracting scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; scoring the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and presenting the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer.
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Specification