Patent Document ID: 9678992
Application ID: 13110282

Base Claim:
1. A method comprising: under control of one or more processors configured with executable instructions: receiving a search query; determining one or more semantic classes applicable to the search query; identifying multiple terms that are (i) analogous to one another and (ii) within one or more of the semantic classes; obtaining web images corresponding to at least a subset of the multiple terms; obtaining near-duplicate images of a subset of the web images associated with the one or more semantic classes; removing noisy images from the near-duplicate images to create a denoised image set; determining representative text associated with the denoised image set; based at least in part on the representative text associated with the denoised image set, selecting at least one representative image for the one or more semantic classes; training at least one query-dependent classifier based at least in part on the representative text; employing the at least one query-dependent classifier to create the denoised image set for individual ones of the semantic classes; and selecting the at least one representative image from the denoised image set as an image answer for the search query.

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Claim 6:
6. The method of claim 1 , the method further comprising: compiling text of the near-duplicate images associated with the one or more semantic classes into a corresponding training document; removing stop words from the training document; and removing terms having a frequency of occurrence that is less than a predetermined threshold from the training document.