Answering Questions Via a Persona-Based Natural Language Processing (NLP) System

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 computing device implementing a Question Answering (QA) system, causes the computing device to:

• receive an identification of a requested persona from a user;
• receive a natural language question input specifying an input question to be answered by the QA system;
• customize, in response to receiving the requested persona, components of the QA system to answer questions from a viewpoint of the requested persona;
• generate an answer to the input question from the viewpoint of the requested persona based on the customization of the components of the QA system;
• and
• output the answer to the input question in a form representative of the requested persona, wherein the computer readable program further causes the computing device to customize components of the QA system to answer questions from a viewpoint of the requested persona at least by:
• retrieving one or more personality attributes for the requested persona and one or more annotations associated with the one or more personality attributes;
• performing a search of a corpus of content based on the one or more annotations to identify portions of content having associated annotations that match at least one of the one or more annotations;
• and
• selecting at least a sub-set of the identified portions of content having associated annotations that match at least one of the one or more annotations as a persona-specific corpus.

An apparatus 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 identification of a requested persona from a user;
• receive a natural language question input specifying an input question to be answered by a Question Answering (QA) system implemented by the apparatus;
• customize, in response to receiving the requested persona, components of the QA system to answer questions from a viewpoint of the requested persona;
• generate an answer to the input question from the viewpoint of the requested persona based on the customization of the components of the QA system;
• and
• output the answer to the input question in a form representative of the requested persona, wherein the instructions further cause the processor to customize components of the QA system to answer questions from a viewpoint of the requested persona at least by:
• retrieving one or more personality attributes for the requested persona and one or more annotations associated with the one or more personality attributes;
• performing a search of a corpus of content based on the one or more annotations to identify portions of content having associated annotations that match at least one of the one or more annotations;
• and
• selecting at least a sub-set of the identified portions of content having associated annotations that match at least one of the one or more annotations as a persona-specific corpus.