Patent ID: 7797303
Filing Date: 2010-09-14
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A troubleshooting system comprising: memory which stores instructions comprising: instructions for identifying normalized forms of at least some of the words of a natural language user query input by a user, the user query describing a problem experienced with a machine, instructions for retrieving problem statements from an associated memory, the associated memory including a set of problem statements, the problem statements each being stored as a sequence of linguistically coherent expressions, each expression comprising at least one syntactic unit, and identified parent-child relationships between the syntactic units of a problem statement, each expression having a normalized representation, whereby expressions of retrieved problem statements with the same meaning are presentable as a common normalized representation, each of the retrieved problem statements including at least one word with a normalized form which is recognized as equivalent to one of the identified normalized forms of the user query, each of the retrieved problem statements being associated with at least one solution sequence for addressing the problem with the machine; instructions for refining the user's query comprising: a processor which executes the instructions.