Patent Document ID: 20090287678
Application ID: 12152411
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method of generating answers to questions based on any corpus of data, said method comprising: receiving an input query and performing query context analysis upon said query to break down said input query into query terms, all query terms comprising both searchable and non-searchable components; utilizing one of more searchable components and conducting a search in any corpus of data including structured and unstructured data to obtain passages potentially including candidate answers, all passages potentially including candidate answers being stored in a data storage device; analyzing all retrieved passages and that passage's metadata, in a candidate answer generation module, to generate an output plurality of data structures including candidate answers based upon the analyzing; performing, by each of a plurality of parallel operating modules, supporting passage retrieval operation upon the set of candidate answers, and for each candidate answer, traversing the said data corpus and the said data storage device to find those passages having candidate answer in addition to query terms; automatically scoring all candidate answers using the said supporting passages by a plurality of scoring modules, each producing a module score; applying a candidate answer ranking function to the said modules scores to determine one or more query answers; and, generating a query response based on said one or more query answers for delivery to a user.