Abstract: A question and answer (Q&A) system is enhanced to support natural language queries into any document format regardless of where the underlying documents are stored. The Q&A system may be implemented “as-a-service,” e.g., a network-accessible information retrieval platform. Preferably, the techniques herein enable a user to quickly and reliably locate a document, page, chart, or data point that he or she is looking for across many different datasets. This provides for a unified view of all of the user's (or, more generally, an enterprise's) information assets (such as Adobe® PDFs, Microsoft® Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Google Docs, scanned materials, etc.), and to be able to deeply search all of these sources for the right document, page, sheet, chart, or even answer to a question.

Abstract: A question and answer (Q&A) system is enhanced to support natural language queries into any document format regardless of where the underlying documents are stored. The Q&A system may be implemented “as-a-service,” e.g., a network-accessible information retrieval platform. Preferably, the techniques herein enable a user to quickly and reliably locate a document, page, chart, or data point that he or she is looking for across many different datasets. This provides for a unified view of all of the user's (or, more generally, an enterprise's) information assets (such as Adobe® PDFs, Microsoft® Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Google Docs, scanned materials, etc.), and to be able to deeply search all of these sources for the right document, page, sheet, chart, or even answer to a question.