Patent ID: 6584464
Filing Date: 2003-06-24
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
An information server for directing users of the information server to desired sources of information where the desired sources of information are determined, at least in part, based on user input, the information server comprising:query input processor for accepting an initial user query; a question database of template questions, wherein a template question is a question in the database that is coupled to at least one answer reference, the answer reference being one of an answer to the template question or a pointer to a possible location of an answer to the template question; a question processor that processes the initial user query to identify a set of correlated template questions selected from the question database, wherein the question processor comprises a parser for generating a syntactic structure from the list of words and a normalizer for reducing the syntactic structure to a canonical syntactic structure; means for presenting at least some of the set of template questions to the user; means for accepting a user selection of a template question if more than one template question is presented; and an answer processor which responds to a user selection of a presented template question from the presented set of template questions, wherein the response of the answer processor depends on the at least one answer reference coupled to the user selected question from the presented set of template questions.