Method and apparatus for Utilizing Structural Information in Semi-Structured Documents to Generate Candidates for Question Answering Systems

Abstract

An approach to candidate answer generation by leveraging structural information in semi-structured resources, such as the title of a document and anchor texts in a document.

1 . A method for candidate generation for question answering comprising:
 receiving a natural language question and formulating queries used to retrieve search results including documents and passages that are relevant to answering the natural language question;   receiving at least one document or passage together with its provenance information;   accessing a semi-structured source of information based on the provenance;   retrieving substructures/entities including a title of a document and anchor texts from the passage within the document;   extracting from the search results candidate answers to the natural language question;   selecting the title and the anchor texts as candidate answers;   applying a normalization operation to the substructure/entity;   scoring and ranking the answers to produce a final ranked list of candidate answers with associated confidence scores; and   returning the resulting list of the candidate answers.