Patent Document ID: 9336269
Application ID: 13803628

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method comprising: identifying one or more candidate topics from a query; generating, for each candidate topic, a candidate topic-answer pair that includes (i) the candidate topic, and (ii) an answer to the query for the candidate topic; obtaining search results based on the query, wherein one or more of the search results references an annotated resource, wherein an annotated resource is a resource that, based on an automated evaluation of the content of the resource, is associated with an annotation that identifies one or more likely topics associated with the resource; for each candidate topic-answer pair, determining a score for the candidate topic-answer pair based on (i) an occurrence of the candidate topic in the annotations of the resources referenced by one or more of the search results, and (ii) an occurrence of the answer in annotations of the resources referenced by the one or more search results, or in the resources referenced by the one or more search results; and determining whether to respond to the query with one or more answers from the candidate topic-answer pairs, based on the scores.

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Claim 3:
3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein determining whether to respond to the query comprises comparing one or more of the scores to a predetermined threshold; and the method further comprises determining, based on the comparison of the one or more scores to the predetermined threshold, to not respond to the query with an answer from among the candidate topic-answer pairs.