International Business Machines Corporation
Efficient resolution of type-coercion queries in a question answer system using disjunctive sub-lexical answer types

Abstract:

An approach is provided in which an information handling system identifies candidate answers from a knowledge base that correspond to a question comprising a lexical answer type (LAT). The information handling system determines sub-LATs corresponding to the LAT in a database that are child LATs of the LAT. The information handling system then identifies a set of the candidate answers that correspond to at least one of the sub-LATs and ranks the set of candidate answers based on one or more ranking criterion. In turn, the information handling system provides the ranked set of candidate answers to a user.