Patent Document ID: 9569724
Application ID: 13244348

Base Claim:
1. A computer program product for automatically generating answers to questions, the computer program product comprising a non-transitory storage medium, said medium not a propagating signal, said non-transitory storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions run by the processing circuit for performing a method, the method comprising: receiving an input query; determining a lexical answer type (LAT) for the input query; receiving a candidate answer for the input query; matching the candidate answer to a first instance in an ontology; matching the first instance to a first instance type in the ontology; matching the LAT to a second instance type in the ontology; identifying one or more logical rules in the ontology that relate the second instance type to the first instance type; producing a score for the candidate answer based on the matching steps; and modifying the score for the candidate answer based on the logical rule identified that relates the second instance type and the first instance type.

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Claim 6:
6. The computer program product of claim 1 , wherein said lexical answer type comprises a query LAT string, said matching the lexical answer type to the second instance in the ontology comprises: accessing a resource having ontological content; obtaining one or more types from said resource that match the query LAT string; and accessing a data corpus, and obtaining from said data corpus a ranked list of second instances based on said obtained one or more types therein.