Patent Document ID: 9720962
Application ID: 14463154

Base Claim:
1. A method, in a question and answer (QA) system comprising a processor and a memory, for generating an answer to a superlative question, the method comprising: analyzing, by the QA system, the superlative question to extract a superlative term in the superlative question and a focus of the superlative question; identifying, by the QA system, a metric by which to evaluate the superlative term based on one of a clue term in the superlative question or one or more portions of content of a corpus of information comprising the superlative term and focus; executing, by the QA system, a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric; and outputting, by the QA system, a final answer to the superlative question based on the one or more candidate answers, wherein identifying the metric comprises identifying a plurality of metrics, and wherein executing a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric comprises performing a separate search for each metric in the plurality of metrics and generating a separate set of one or more candidate answers for each metric in the plurality of metrics.

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Claim 5:
5. The method of claim 1 , wherein identifying the metric comprises identifying the metric based on a clue term in the superlative question at least by performing a lookup operation in a list data structure based on terms in the superlative question to identify the clue term as being present in the superlative question, wherein the list data structure stores a listing of clue terms recognizable by the QA system.