Patent Document ID: 8805756
Application ID: 14067416

Base Claim:
1. A method for enhancing automated deep question and answering comprising: receiving by a computer from a deep question-answer computing system at least one potential answer to a user-supplied clue or user-supplied question with a confidence factor associated with each received potential answer, wherein the confidence factor comprises an estimated likelihood of correctness according to semantic analysis exclusive of a rank based on feature or keyword count; comparing by a computer each confidence factor to a threshold; responsive to a confidence factor not meeting the threshold, automatically performing by a computer a crowd sourcing operation on the user-supplied clue or user-supplied question to yield a crowd-sourced enhancement to the clue or question; supplying by a computer the crowd-sourced enhancement to the deep question-answer computing system; responsive to receiving by a computer an enhanced potential answer and associated enhanced confidence factor from the deep question-answer computing system, repeating the comparing; and responsive to an enhanced potential answer and associated enhanced confidence factor meeting the threshold, providing to a user the enhanced potential answer via a user interface portion of a computer system.

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Claim 3:
3. The method as set forth in claim 1 wherein the automatically performing a crowd sourcing operation comprises performing a historical analysis of similar questions, clues or combination of questions and clues to determine potentially missing information from the received question or received clue, and performing an action to collect the missing information, and wherein the supplying a crowd-sourced enhancement to the deep question-answer computing system comprises including the collected missing information with the a crowd-sourced enhancement.