Patent Document ID: 8601030
Application ID: 13228709

Base Claim:
1. A method for providing decision support comprising: receiving an action plan comprising suggested actions from a decision support system into a particular computerized machine; automatically determining parameters of said suggested actions using said particular computerized machine to serve as input to a question-answering system operating on said particular computerized machine; automatically generating questions based on said parameters using said question-answering system; automatically searching a corpus of unstructured data to retrieve answers to said questions using said question-answering system; automatically providing impact confidence values for each answer indicating degree of impact said answers have on said suggested actions using said question-answering system; and if said answers have an impact confidence value and a relevance confidence value that are above predetermined confidence thresholds, causing said decision support system to reproduce said action plan with modified suggested actions that are different than said suggested actions using said questions, said answers, and said impact confidence values.

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Claim 6:
6. The method according to claim 1 , said decision support system using a database of structured data to generate said suggested actions, and said question-answering system using said unstructured data from a variety of unrelated sources separate from said database of structured data to retrieve said answers.