Extracting important sentences from documents to answer hypothesis that include causes and consequences

A computer program product for machine-validating an input hypothesis sentence, the computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a computer to cause the computer to perform a method comprising:

• extracting, by a hardware processor from a document database D using the input hypothesis sentence that includes a causal part and a consequence part, a set D1 of documents related to the causal part;
• extracting, by the hardware processor from the set D1 of documents, a set S of sentences that include one or more expressions of opinion;
• obtaining, by the hardware processor, a word list W of words that have a high co-occurrence in the set D1 of documents;
• selecting, by the hardware processor from the set S of sentences, a set S1 of sentences that are positionally close to any of the words in the word list W;
• selecting, by the hardware processor from the set S of sentences, a set S2 of sentences that are related to the words in the consequence part of the hypothesis;
• and
• extracting, by the hardware processor, and displaying, by a display device, sentences included in both the set S1 of sentences and the set S2 of sentences as opinion sentences in relation to the input hypothesis sentence.

A computer processing system for machine-validating an input hypothesis sentence, comprising:

• a memory device including program code stored thereon;
• a hardware processor, operatively coupled to the memory device, and configured to run the program code stored on the memory device to
• extract, from a document database D using the input hypothesis sentence that includes a causal part and a consequence part, a set D1 of documents related to the causal part;
• extract, from the set D1 of documents, a set S of sentences that include one or more expressions of opinion;
• obtain a word list W of words that have a high co-occurrence in the set D1 of documents;
• select, from the set S of sentences, a set S1 of sentences that are positionally close to any of the words in the word list W;
• select, from the set S of sentences, a set S2 of sentences that are related to the words in the consequence part of the hypothesis;
• and
• extract and cause to be displayed on a display device sentences included in both the set S1 of sentences and the set S2 of sentences as opinion sentences in relation to the input hypothesis sentence.