Patent Document ID: 9483731
Application ID: 13710509

Base Claim:
1. A method of scoring answers to questions in a question-answering system, said method comprising: receiving a question into a computerized question-answer system operating on a computerized device; constructing, by said computerized device, title-oriented documents from a corpus of data, said corpus of data comprising natural language documents, each said title-oriented document comprising a title and a topical field, said topical field comprising a field name and field content associated with said topical field of a document in said corpus of data, said field content including at least a portion of text derived from said document; creating a relation instance, using said computerized device, by combining a field identifier for said topical field, a title concept identifier, and a corresponding field content concept identifier; calculating a count for each said relation instance, using said computerized device, said count being based on a number of occurrences of said title concept identifier and said field content concept identifier within a corresponding document in said corpus of data; analyzing terms in said question, using said computerized device, said analyzing identifying a question content identifier based on previously established question term categories; comparing said question content identifier to said relation instance, using said computerized device, said comparing identifying a question-matching relation instance; generating, by said computerized device, an answer to said question by identifying said title concept identifier of each said question-matching relation instance as a candidate answer to said question; and generating a score for said candidate answer by adding each said count within each said relation instance corresponding to said candidate answer, using said computerized device.

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Claim 2:
2. The method according to claim 1 , said count for each said relation instance further comprising pointwise mutual information.