Patent ID: 8666983

Claim:
A system, comprising: one or more processors; and one or more media storage devices storing a plurality of components, each component of the plurality of components comprising instructions that are executable by the one or more processors, the plurality of components including: an input component to receive a query; an abstraction component to: map the query to an abstraction hierarchy according to a distribution of terms found in potential answer passages for the query by calculating a similarity value between the query and each of a plurality of queries in the abstraction hierarchy; and group the query with a most similar query in the abstraction hierarchy based on the similarity value; and an identification component to map data pairs comprising query-response pairs to the abstraction hierarchy to identify informative terms for a set of nodes in the abstraction hierarchy by determining using a Dunning measure a term-by-occurrence contingency data structure for each term found in possible answer passages for each question in each of the query-response pairs.