Patent Document ID: 9373086
Application ID: 14591051

Base Claim:
1. A method, in a data processing system having a processor and a memory and which implements a Question and Answer (QA) system, the method comprising: receiving, by the QA system, an input question; analyzing, by the QA system, the input question to extract one or more semantic or syntactic features of the input question; determining, by the QA system, an answer to the input question and supporting evidence for the answer based on an evaluation of a corpus of information; analyzing, by the QA system, natural language content of the supporting evidence to identify reasoning key words or reasoning key phrases and associated reasoning criteria, present in the natural language content of the supporting evidence, the reasoning criteria specifying a reason as to why the answer is considered to be a correct answer by a provider of the supporting evidence; generating, by the QA system, one or more rules based on the identified reasoning criteria, wherein the one or more rules correlate the answer with the identified reasoning criteria and the one or more semantic or syntactic features of the input question; storing, by the QA system, the one or more rules as one or more entries in a reasoning data structure; and processing, by the QA system, a subsequent question based on the reasoning data structure.

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Claim 7:
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein processing the subsequent question based on the reasoning data structure comprises: searching the reasoning data structure based on features of the subsequent question to identify a matching entry in the reasoning data structure having one or more semantic or syntactic features similar to the features of the subsequent question; retrieving a rule associated with the matching entry; and applying the rule to evidence identified in the corpus of information corresponding to a focus of the subsequent question to determine if the identified reasoning criteria of the rule are satisfied by the evidence identified in the corpus of information corresponding to the focus of the subsequent question.