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AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsMing Zhou, Furu Wei, Xiaohua Liu, Hong Sun, Yajuan Duan, Chengjie Sun, Heung-Yeung Shum
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Techniques described enable answering a natural language question using machine learning-based methods to gather and analyze evidence from web searches. A received natural language question is analyzed to extract query units and to determine a question type, answer type, and/or lexical answer type using rules-based heuristics and/or machine learning trained classifiers. Query generation templates are employed to generate a plurality of ranked queries to be used to gather evidence to determine the answer to the natural language question. Candidate answers are extracted from the results based on the answer type and/or lexical answer type, and ranked using a ranker previously trained offline. Confidence levels are calculated for the candidate answers and top answer(s) may be provided to the user if the confidence levels of the top answer(s) surpass a threshold.
A computer-implemented method comprising:
A system comprising:
One or more computer-readable storage media storing instructions that, when executed by at least one processor, instruct the at least one processor to perform actions comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.