Lexical answer type confidence estimation and application
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsJames J. Fan, David A. Ferrucci, David C. Gondek, Aditya A. Kalyanpur, Adam P. Lally, James W. Murdock, Wlodek W. Zadrozny
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A system, method and computer program product for automatically estimating the confidence of a detected LAT to provide a more accurate overall score for an obtained candidate answer. A confidence “score” or value of each detected LAT is obtained, and the system and method performs combining the confidence score with a degree of match between a LAT and an AnswerType of the candidate answer to provide improved overall score for the candidate answer.
Claims10
A computer-implemented method for automatically generating answers to questions comprising the steps of:
- determining a lexical answer type (LAT) associated with an input query;
- computing a first score for said input query LAT, wherein said first score is indicative of a quality of said query LAT;
- obtaining a candidate answer to said input query from an information source;
- determining an answer type (AT) for said candidate answer;
- comparing said query LAT with said candidate answer AT;
- computing a second score representing a degree of match between said compared query LAT with said candidate answer AT;
- and
- combining said first score and said second score to provide a total score indicative of a quality of said candidate answer,
- wherein a processing device automatically performs one or more of said determining a query LAT, computing said first score and second score, obtaining candidate answers, determining a AT, comparing and combining.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.