System, method and program product for answering questions using a search engine

A computer executed method for searching a plurality of words in one or more documents in free form text, the free form text having a natural language structure, the method comprising the steps of:

• receiving one or more queries as input;
• matching one or more of the queries to one or more question templates of a pattern record, the pattern record further containing an associated question word pattern and an associated set of QA-Tokens, the matching determining one or more template matches, the query process further replacing the associated question word pattern in the matching query with the associated set of QA-Tokens, being processed query QA-Tokens, the query process creating a processed query having the QA-Tokens and one or more processed query words being the words of the queries that were not replaced;
• and
• a searching process that matches one or more of the process query words with one or more index words in an index record and one or more of the processed query QA-Tokens with one or more of the index QA-Tokens, in the index record, the index words and QA-Tokens being features, the searching process further scoring one or more windows by a sliding the window over the one or more sentences of one or more of the documents, the score of the window being dependent on the number of matching locations in the window.

A computer system for searching a plurality of words in one or more documents in free form text, the free form text having a natural language structure, the system comprising:

• means for receiving one or more queries as input;
• means for matching one or more of the queries to one or more question templates of a pattern record, the pattern record further containing an associated question word pattern and an associated set of QA-Tokens, the matching determining one or more template matches, the query process further replacing the associated question word pattern in the matching query with the associated set of QA-Tokens, being processed query QA-Tokens, the query process creating a processed query having the QA-Tokens and one or more processed query words being the words of the queries that were not replaced;
• and
• means for matching one or more of the process query words with one or more index words in an index record and one or more of the processed query QA-Tokens with one or more of the index QA-Tokens, in the index record, the index words and QA-Tokens being features, the searching process further scoring one or more windows by a sliding the window over the one or more sentences of one or more of the documents, the score of the window being dependent on the number of matching locations in the window.