Dynamic Load Balancing Based on Question Difficulty

A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a data processing system implementing a Question and Answer (QA) system having a plurality of QA system pipelines, causes the data processing system to:

• receive an input question for processing by the QA system;
• determine a predicted question difficulty for generating an answer to the input question based on at least one feature extracted from the input question and a correlation of the at least one feature with a predicted level of question difficulty;
• select a QA system pipeline from the plurality of QA system pipelines based on the predicted question difficulty;
• route the input question to the selected QA system pipeline for processing;
• and
• process the input question by the selected QA system pipeline to generate an answer for the input question.

A data processing system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory coupled to the processor, wherein the memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to:
• receive an input question for processing by a Question and Answer (QA) system;
• determine a predicted question difficulty for generating an answer to the input question based on at least one feature extracted from the input question and a correlation of the at least one feature with a predicted level of question difficulty;
• select a QA system pipeline from a plurality of QA system pipelines based on the predicted question difficulty;
• route the input question to the selected QA system pipeline for processing;
• and
• process the input question by the selected QA system pipeline to generate an answer for the input question.