Patent Document ID: 9740985
Application ID: 14295514

Base Claim:
1. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a computing device, causes the computing device to: receive an input question; generate one or more candidate answers from a corpus of knowledge using a pipeline of software engines, wherein the pipeline of software engines generates a plurality of features extracted from the question, the one or more candidate answers, or the corpus of knowledge; generate a question difficulty score based on the plurality of features using a machine learning model, wherein the machine learning model maps features to assigned weights for scaling the difficulty score; store the question difficulty score in association with the input question to form a stored set of questions; receive a question policy, wherein the question, policy comprises a target difficulty level and a threshold; and select a set of questions from the stored set of questions, wherein the set of questions have a difficulty within the threshold of the target difficulty level.

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Claim 3:
3. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein the plurality of features comprises one or more features from the set consisting of: a number of times a target concept is referenced in the corpus of knowledge; a feature indicating a topicality or centrality of a topic; syntactic clues; intersentential discourse clues; discourse structure attributes; a frequency of a predicate/argument structure in the corpus of knowledge; a position in the corpus of knowledge of an initial mention of a concept; whether a definition of a term is contained within the corpus of knowledge; or a degree to which a term is used in a sentence in an unexpected context compared to a typical context within the corpus of knowledge.