Method and system to answer a natural-language question

Abstract

Providing methods and systems to quickly and accurately respond to a natural-language question. The responses to the question can depend on additional information about the user asking the question, and the subject matter of the question the user asked. For example, the system knows that the user understands French, and can supply French answers to the user. Such additional information can improve on relevancy of the responses to the question. More than one responses can be provided to the user to allow the user to pick the more appropriate one. One embodiment uses a computer with a database having many phrases and question formats. The computer identifies phrases in the question based on at least one grammatical rules and phrases in the database. Then the computer links the phrases to categories based on at least one semantic rule, the subject matter of the question, and information about the user, such as previous questions asked by the user. The computer then selects at least two question formats based on at least the scores. After the question formats are selected, the system allows the user to pick at least one of the question formats so as to have an answer to the question generated.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION[0001] The present invention is a continuation-in-part of co-pending U.S. application entitled, "Learning Method and System Based on Questioning III", filed on Jul. 2, 1999, invented by Chi Fai Ho and Peter Tong, and having a Ser. No. of 09 / 347,184, which is hereby incorporated by reference into this application.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002] The present invention relates generally to methods and systems to answer a question, and more particularly to methods and systems to accurately answer a natural-language question.[0003] Numerous search engines in the market have provided us with an unprecedented amount of freely-available information. All we have to do is to type in our questions, and we will be inundated by information. For example, there is a search engine that regularly gives us tens of thousands of Web sites to a single question. It would take practically days to go through every single site to find our answer, especially if our netw...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009] The present invention provides methods and systems that can quickly provide a handful of accurate responses to a natural-language question. The responses can depend on additional information about the user and about the subject matter of the question so as to significantly improve on the relevancy of the responses. The user is allowed to pick one or more of the responses to have an answer generated. Furthermore, the answer to the question can be in a language different from the language of the question to provide more relevant answers.

[0013] In another example, the piece of information is related to an interest of the user. Again, if the user is interested in traveling, and not food, certain ambiguities in his question can be resolved. Based on the user's response to certain inquiries from the system, the accuracy of the answer can be enhanced.

[0017] After providing the score to the categorized phrase, the system can identify at least two question formats in the database based on the score. These question formats can again help the system resolve ambiguities in the question. For example, the question is, "How to play bridge?" Assume that the question is in the general subject area of card games. It is not clear if the user wants to find out basic rules on the card game bridge or to learn some more advanced techniques. Then, one question format can be on basic rules on bridge, and the other format can be on bridge techniques. The user is allowed to pick at least one of the question formats to have the corresponding answer generated.

[0018] In another embodiment, the answer can be in a language different from the language of the question. This improves on the accuracy of the answers to the question. For example, if the user is interested in Japan, and if the user understands Japanese, based on the question format picked, a Japanese answer is identified to his English question. Such answers can provide more relevant information to the user.

Problems solved by technology

It would take practically days to go through every single site to find our answer, especially if our network connections are through relatively low speed modems.

Another challenge faced by users of many search engines is to search by key words.

Unfortunately, this is unnatural.

Some of them also provide limited number of responses.

However, their responses are inaccurate, and typically do not provide satisfactory answers to our questions.

Their answers are not tailored to our needs.

Providing accurate responses to natural language questions is a very difficult problem, especially when our questions are not definite.

To further complicate the problem is the need to get information from documents written in different languages.

The reason may be because translation errors would lead to even less accurate answers.

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