Efficient grammatical property alignment for a question answering system
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsEdward G. Katz, Stephen A. Boxwell, Kristen M. Summers, Charles E. Beller
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Abstract
A service, in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, identifies one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among multiple passages in the corpus. The service aligns one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question. The service returns the one or more answers in response to the question.
Claims20
A method comprising:
- in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, identifying, by a computer, one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among a plurality of passages in the corpus;
- aligning, by the computer, one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question, wherein aligning the one or more answer grammatical properties comprises:
- evaluating, by the computer, whether one or more respective answer grammatical properties of a respective answer from among the one or more answers match one or more grammatical properties of the focus;
- in response to the one or more respective answer grammatical properties of the respective answer not matching the one or more grammatical properties of the focus, replacing, by the computer, the respective answer with a replacement answer matching the one or more question grammatical properties;
- and
- in response to replacing the respective answer with the replacement answer, identifying, by the computer, the replacement answer as aligned;
- and
- returning, by the computer, the one or more answers in response to the question.
A computer system comprising one or more processors, one or more computer-readable memories, one or more computer-readable storage devices, and program instructions, stored on at least one of the one or more storage devices for execution by at least one of the one or more processors via at least one of the one or more memories, the stored program instructions comprising:
- program instructions, in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, to identify one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among a plurality of passages in the corpus;
- program instructions to align one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question, wherein aligning the one or more answer grammatical properties comprises:
- program instructions to evaluate whether one or more respective answer grammatical properties of a respective answer from among the one or more answers match one or more grammatical properties of the focus;
- in response to the one or more respective answer grammatical properties of the respective answer not matching the one or more grammatical properties of the focus, to replace the respective answer with a replacement answer matching the one or more question grammatical properties;
- and
- program instructions, in response to replacing the respective answer with the replacement answer, to identify the replacement answer as aligned;
- and
- program instructions to return the one or more answers in response to the question.
A computer program product comprises a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, wherein the computer readable storage medium is not a transitory signal per se, the program instructions executable by a computer to cause the computer to:
- in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, identify, by a computer, one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among a plurality of passages in the corpus;
- align, by the computer, one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question, wherein aligning the one or more answer grammatical properties comprises:
- evaluate, by the computer, whether one or more respective answer grammatical properties of a respective answer from among the one or more answers match one or more grammatical properties of the focus;
- in response to the one or more respective answer grammatical properties of the respective answer not matching the one or more grammatical properties of the focus, replace, by the computer, the respective answer with a replacement answer matching the one or more question grammatical properties;
- and
- in response to replacing the respective answer with the replacement answer, identify, by the computer, the replacement answer as aligned;
- and
- return, by the computer, the one or more answers in response to the question.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.