Significance of relationships discovered in a corpus

A computer program product comprising a computer-readable storage medium having a set of instructions stored therein which, when executed by a processor, causes the processor to determine a significance ranking for discovered relationships by:

• identifying a focus within a natural language question;
• mining a first body of information for disclosure of entities within the first body of information;
• determining relationships among the entities based on the focus;
• generating a targeting document containing a first relationship and a second relationship, the first and second relationships being relationships among the entities determined from the first body of information;
• recording mining data for relationships in the targeting document in support of an importance criteria;
• ranking the first relationship with respect to the second relationship based on the recorded mining data and according to the importance criteria as a set of ranking data;
• and
• storing the targeting document including the set of ranking data and mining data in the first body of information for on-demand access during a question-answer session corresponding to the domain of knowledge;
• wherein:
• the importance criteria is a first degree to which first relationship is known and a second degree to which the second relationship is known according to a dictionary of commonly known relationships for the domain of knowledge;
• and
• the first relationship being ranked as more important than the second relationship because the first degree is smaller than the second degree.

A computer system comprising:

• a processor set;
• and
• a computer readable storage medium;
• wherein:
• the processor set is structured, located, connected, and/or programmed to run program instructions stored on the computer readable storage medium;
• and
• the program instructions which, when executed by the processor set, cause the processor set to determine a significance ranking for discovered relationships by:
• identifying a focus within a natural language question;
• mining a first body of information for disclosure of entities within the first body of information;
• determining relationships among the entities based on the focus;
• generating a targeting document containing a first relationship and a second relationship, the first and second relationships being relationships among the entities determined from the first body of information;
• recording mining data for relationships in the targeting document in support of an importance criteria;
• ranking the first relationship with respect to the second relationship based on the recorded mining data and according to the importance criteria as a set of ranking data;
• and
• storing the targeting document including the set of ranking data and mining data in the first body of information for on-demand access during a question-answer session corresponding to the domain of knowledge;
• wherein:
• the importance criteria is a first degree to which first relationship is known and a second degree to which the second relationship is known according to a dictionary of commonly known relationships for the domain of knowledge;
• and
• the first relationship being ranked as more important than the second relationship because the first degree is smaller than the second degree.