Patent Document ID: 9892362
Application ID: 14546417

Base Claim:
1. A method, in a data processing system comprising a processor and a memory, for identifying and evaluating hypothetical ontological links in an ontology and outputting information, the method comprising: receiving, by the data processing system, an ontology comprising a plurality of information concept objects and one or more actual links between the information concept objects; receiving, by the data processing system, an indication of at least a selected information concept object for which a hypothetical ontological link is to be evaluated, wherein the hypothetical ontological link is a potential link that is not already present as an actual link in the ontology; automatically generating, by the data processing system, one or more natural language questions for processing by a Question Answering (QA) system pipeline based on at least an identification of a type of the selected information concept object; processing, by the QA system pipeline, the one or more natural language questions to generate answer results; calculating, by the data processing system, a score for the hypothetical ontological link based on the answer results; and outputting, by the data processing system, information associated with the hypothetical ontological link based on the score for the hypothetical ontological link, wherein calculating a score for the hypothetical ontological link comprises: calculating a score for each answer result in the generated answer results; generating a weighted score for each of the answer results; and combining the weighted scores for each of the answer results to generate the score for the hypothetical ontological link.

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Claim 8:
8. The method of claim 1 , wherein outputting information associated with the hypothetical ontological link based on the score for the hypothetical ontological link comprises updating the ontology to include the hypothetical ontological link, as an actual link corresponding to the hypothetical ontological link, in the ontology between the selected information concept object and another information concept object in the ontology, in response to the score for the hypothetical ontological link meeting or exceeding a predetermined criterion.