Patent Document ID: 9703860
Application ID: 14506728

Base Claim:
1. A method, in a Question and Answer (QA) system comprising a processor and a memory, for identifying a related previously processed question, the method comprising: processing, by the QA system, a first question to generate an answer to the first question and a supporting evidence passage that supports the answer to the first question being a correct answer to the first question; performing, by the QA system, a lookup operation in a question repository based on an identifier of the supporting evidence passage to identify an entry corresponding to a previously processed question, different than the first question, that previously had an answer generated based on the supporting evidence passage; returning, by the QA system, the previously processed question and the answer to the first question to a submitter of the first question; calculating, by the QA system, an affinity score of the first question, wherein the affinity score represents an affinity between the first question and the supporting evidence passage; and storing the first question and the affinity score in the question repository in association with the supporting evidence passage, wherein calculating the affinity score of the first question comprises: clustering one or more topics in the first question; determining a correspondence of the supporting evidence passage to one or more clusters of the one or more topics in the first question; and calculating an affinity score based on the correspondence, wherein the affinity score is calculated to be relatively higher in response supporting evidence passage being clustered in the one or more clusters than in response to the supporting evidence passage not being clustered in the one or more clusters.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: generating a ranked listing of previously processed questions that previously had an answer generated based on the supporting evidence passage, wherein returning the answer to the first question and the previously processed question to the submitter of the first question further comprises returning the ranked listing of previously processed questions.