Patent Document ID: 9721001
Application ID: 14317604

Base Claim:
1. A system comprising: a processor; a network controller to receive a message containing a sentence; a clause identifier, implemented at least partly in one or more of configurable logic or fixed functionality logic hardware, to separate the sentence into a plurality of clauses; an analyzer, implemented at least partly in one or more of configurable logic or fixed functionality logic hardware, to apply a set of question detection rules to each of the plurality of clauses on a clause-by-clause basis; and a sentence classifier, implemented at least partly in one or more of configurable logic or fixed functionality logic hardware, to automatically designate the sentence as a question and to generate notification that the sentence is a question if the question detection rules indicate that at least one clause of the plurality of clauses is a question independent of a position of the at least one clause in the sentence to reduce computational overhead at the processor.

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Claim 6:
6. The system of claim 1 , wherein one or more of the question detection rules defines a clause as a question if the clause begins with a to be or to have word followed by a noun.