SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPLEMENTING A QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEM WITH MIXED-LANGUAGE SOURCE DOCUMENTS

• Main Authors: Beller, Charles E, Vernier, Stanley J, Ackermann, Christopher F, Boxwell, Stephen A
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 11.10.2018
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTER SYSTEMS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

Embodiments can provide a computer implemented method, in a data processing system comprising a processor and a memory comprising instructions which are executed by the processor to cause the processor to implement a mixed-language question answering supplement system, the method comprising receiving a question in a target language; determining the question cannot be answered using a target-language only corpus; applying natural language processing to parse the question into at least one focus; for each focus, determining if one or more target language verbs share direct syntactic dependency with the focus; for each of the one or more verbs sharing direct syntactic dependency, determining if one or more target language entities share direct syntactic dependency with the verb; determining one or more Abstract Universal Verbal Types associated with each verb; for each of the one or more Abstract Universal Verbal Types, determining whether a dependency between a source language entity and a source language verb is of the same type as the dependency between the target language verb and the target language entity; if the dependency is similar, returning the source language entity as a member of a set; populating the set of returned source language entities for each focus in the target language question; identifying one or more parallel passages wherein all core arguments are matched; for each parallel passage: identifying the presence or absence of oblique nominal arguments; and measuring the precision of the oblique nominal arguments in the parallel passages against those present in the target language question; and returning an answer to the target question in the target language based on a scoring of the parallel passages based on the accuracy of their respective oblique nominal arguments.