Abstract: A method learns approximate translations of unfamiliar measurement units during deep question answering (DeepQA) system training and usage. The DeepQA system receives a training set containing Question-Answer (QA) pairs having known unit-of-measurement terms, where each QA pair contains an answer having a known numeric value for a corresponding question from the QA pair. The DeepQA system receives a question from each QA pair from the training set to the DeepQA system in order to find answers and passage phrases to the question from each QA pair, and then identifies all found answers and passage phrases having values that are within a predetermined range of answer values of the training set, where one or more of the identified all found answers and passage phrases contain unfamiliar unit-of-measurement terms, in order to learn approximate translations of the unfamiliar unit-of-measurement terms.

Abstract: A method utilizes a deep question answering (QA) system to provide an answer, to a certain type of question, that includes an unfamiliar measurement unit. An answer key is utilized to train a DeepQA system to search for passages that answer a certain type of question, where the DeepQA system outputs an answer key value and an answer key measurement unit that is associated with the answer key value. The method identifies a candidate answer that includes a candidate passage containing the answer key value but not the answer key measurement unit, where a candidate passage measurement unit in the candidate passage is associated with the answer key value. The method then matches the answer key measurement unit to the candidate passage measurement unit based on the answer key measurement unit and the candidate passage measurement unit both being associated with the answer key value.

Abstract: A system and a method for determining user synonyms in a query processing system is disclosed. A first query is received from a user of the query processing system. The query is processed through the query processing system to generate results for the first query. The user then provides a second query. The system determines a contextual similarity between the first query and the second query. When the first query and the second query are determined to be contextually similar, a first term is identified in the first query that is different from a second term in the second query. Once identified, the system determines if the first term and the second term are not listed as synonyms in the thesaurus. If they are not listed as synonyms they can be added as synonyms to the thesaurus.

Abstract: Embodiments are directed to interaction with an open-domain question and answer system by recognizing questions that are highly broad or abstract, and generating and processing a batch of questions expressing alternate, concrete instances of the more general, abstract question. Responses to all of the questions in the batch are considered as candidates, and the strongest general answers are returned. A weighted, ranked answer set, based on weighting individual concrete questions and scaling the answers proportional to the weight of the questions, is provided to the user. The approach, according to embodiments herein, addresses the need for responses to broad questions in which a response to any of a set of more concrete question instances may serve to answer the question.

Abstract: The present invention may receive the question, a plurality of the candidate answers, and a plurality of documents associated with the plurality of candidate answers in the natural language. Then the present invention may tokenize the question, the plurality of the candidate answers, and the plurality of the documents into a corresponding n-gram sequence. The present invention may map n-gram elements from the tokenized question to the n-gram elements of the plurality of the tokenized candidate answers and the plurality of the tokenized documents using the latent token representation technique. The present invention may score the plurality of tokenized candidate answers based on the latent token representation technique. Then, the present invention may determine the precise answer based on the plurality of scored candidate answers.

Abstract: A service, in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, identifies one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among multiple passages in the corpus. The service aligns one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question. The service returns the one or more answers in response to the question.

Abstract: Query service receives a query comprising at least a name component. The query service searches a document corpus to identify multiple passages, each comprising a mention of the name component within a selection of one or more documents of the document corpus. The query service collects bins, each bin comprising a distinct selection of the passages from the one or more documents, each of the bins identifying a separate relationship the name component participates in within the distinct selection of passages. The query service assesses a separate score of each respective bin reflecting the relevance of each respective bin to the query. The query service returns a response to the query with the bins each ranked according to each separate score.

Abstract: Dynamic semantic processing of text in a word processing application with engagement of question-answering system. A user provides a text stream to a computer system via an input source. The input text stream includes a first natural language statement. The system determines that the first natural language statement includes a fact-based component expressed in natural language form. The system identifies an initial span and an alternative span of the first natural language component, based on the determining. The system engages a question-answering (QA) system by providing the initial span and the alternative span of the first natural language component to the QA system, and by receiving, in response to the providing, a set of natural language results from the QA system. The system evaluates the initial span and the alternative span of the first natural language component based on the received natural language results.

Abstract: Embodiments can provide a computer implemented method for harvesting training data for a training set for use by a system capable of answering questions, the system comprising a processor and a memory comprising instructions executed by the processor, the method comprising receiving, from a user, an input question; processing the input question and returning, to the user, a result set comprising one or more ranked hypotheses and one or more ranked evidence passages corresponding to the one or more ranked hypotheses; receiving, from the user, an indication that one of the one or more ranked hypotheses is to be designated a watched hypothesis; adding the input question and the watched hypothesis to a to-be-vetted question/answer (QA) pair set comprising one or more to-be-vetted QA pairs; vetting each of the one or more to-be-vetted QA pairs in the to-be-vetted QA pair set through a first-pass automatic vetting procedure; if a vetted QA pair passes the first-pass automatic vetting procedure, adding the vetted QA

Abstract: Embodiments can provide a computer implemented method, in a data processing system comprising a processor and a memory comprising instructions which are executed by the processor to cause the processor to implement an enhanced corpus management system, the method comprising: identifying one or more functional domain categories; ingesting one or more incoming documents to form an open-domain corpus; for each functional domain category, identifying one or more representative documents to establish a seed sub-corpus; calculating a degree of fit score between each of the one or more incoming documents and the one or more established functional domain category seed sub-corpora; and assigning one or more of the incoming documents to one or more of the functional domain categories based upon the degree of fit score to create an enhanced corpus.

Abstract: A service, in response to receiving a question in a natural language format, identifies one or more selected passages from a corpus that are relevant to a focus of the question from among multiple passages in the corpus. The service aligns one or more answer grammatical properties of one or more answers, selected from the one or more selected passages, to one or more question grammatical properties of the focus of the question. The service returns the one or more answers in response to the question.

Abstract: A method utilizes a deep question answering (QA) system to provide an answer, to a certain type of question, that includes an unfamiliar measurement unit. An answer key is utilized to train a DeepQA system to search for passages that answer a certain type of question, where the DeepQA system outputs an answer key value and an answer key measurement unit that is associated with the answer key value. The method identifies a candidate answer that includes a candidate passage containing the answer key value but not the answer key measurement unit, where a candidate passage measurement unit in the candidate passage is associated with the answer key value. The method then matches the answer key measurement unit to the candidate passage measurement unit based on the answer key measurement unit and the candidate passage measurement unit both being associated with the answer key value.

Abstract: A method learns approximate translations of unfamiliar measurement units during deep question answering (DeepQA) system training and usage. The DeepQA system receives a training set containing Question-Answer (QA) pairs having known unit-of-measurement terms, where each QA pair contains an answer having a known numeric value for a corresponding question from the QA pair. The DeepQA system receives a question from each QA pair from the training set to the DeepQA system in order to find answers and passage phrases to the question from each QA pair, and then identifies all found answers and passage phrases having values that are within a predetermined range of answer values of the training set, where one or more of the identified all found answers and passage phrases contain unfamiliar unit-of-measurement terms, in order to learn approximate translations of the unfamiliar unit-of-measurement terms.

Abstract: A query system identifies a collection of discovered entity bins each comprising unstructured documents with mentions of a name element from a name query and each identified with a particular named entity identifiable from the name element. The query system identifies, from a knowledge base of structured documents, based on identifier components with the name element, candidate records identifying the respective identifier components with the name element, the one or more identifier components identified among the discovery entity bins. For each respective selection of candidate records associated with each bin, the query system applies one or more alignment threshold rules to rank the likelihood that each candidate record within each respective selection matches one or more characteristics of the respective discovery entity bin.

Abstract: A method, system and a computer program product are provided for scoring candidate answers for geographic relevance analyzing an input question to identify one or more first geographic foci of the input question based on geographical contextual information associated with the input question, identifying one or more second geographic foci for a candidate answer generated in response to the input question, and then comparing the first and second geographic foci to generate a geographic relevance score for the candidate answer to the input question.

Abstract: Mechanisms are provided to minimize personally identifiable information (PII) in an electronic document. An iterative personally identifiable information minimization (IPIIM) engine receives an electronic document comprising natural language content having a mention of a protected entity and obfuscates the mention of the protected entity to thereby generate a minimized natural language content. A question answering system processes the minimized natural language content to generate a listing of candidate answers and corresponding confidence scores and the IPIIM engine determines whether or not the minimized natural language content is sufficiently obfuscated based on the listing of candidate answers and corresponding confidence scores. In response to determining that the minimized natural language content is sufficiently obfuscated, the minimized natural language content is provided for processing by a requestor computing device.

Abstract: An embodiment of the invention may include a method, computer program product and system for generating follow-up questions based on machine learning utilizing a computing device. The embodiment may include receiving an input question from a user. The embodiment may include parsing the received input question to extract input question components. Parsing utilizes natural language processing techniques. The embodiment may include executing trained question component models to predict follow-up question components. The extracted input question components are utilized as inputs to the trained question component models. The embodiment may include combining the predicted follow-up question components to generate one or more follow-up questions. The embodiment may include returning the one or more follow-up questions to the user.

Abstract: A system includes a knowledge canvassing system executed by a computer, a processor, and a memory coupled to the processor. The memory is encoded with instructions that when executed cause the processor to provide a training system configured to generate benchmark data, each benchmark datum including a set of one or more benchmark input entities and a set of one or more benchmark output entities associated with the one or more benchmark input entities, query the knowledge canvassing system with each set of benchmark input entities, receive, for each set of benchmark input entities queried, an output result from the knowledge canvassing system that includes a set of zero or more knowledge canvassing system output entities, and generate an evaluation score for each set of knowledge canvassing system output entities based on a comparison of the knowledge canvassing system output entities with the set of benchmark output entities.

Abstract: A query system identifies a collection of discovered entity bins each comprising unstructured documents with mentions of a name element from a name query and each identified with a particular named entity identifiable from the name element. The query system identifies, from a knowledge base of structured documents, based on identifier components with the name element, candidate records identifying the respective identifier components with the name element, the one or more identifier components identified among the discovery entity bins. For each respective selection of candidate records associated with each bin, the query system applies one or more alignment threshold rules to rank the likelihood that each candidate record within each respective selection matches one or more characteristics of the respective discovery entity bin.

Abstract: Embodiments are directed to an entity extraction and filtering method that enables a close search of documents to build filters necessary for near real-time monitoring of streaming sources of information. According to an embodiment, the entity extraction and filtering method operates based on the following parameters. First, a detection of an entity of interest warrants flagging an arriving article for analyst attention. Nothing more than a match may be required. The list of entities may be derived by an entity extractor from a corpus of data. Secondly, automatic updates may be utilized, so that exports are automatically updated to the filters. Thirdly, information flowing past the filters may update a static corpus whether or not they are flagged for an analyst or user. This allows for new relationships to be detected and extracted, and the filters subsequently updated.