International Business Machines Corporation
Text simplification for a question and answer system

Abstract:

A method, system and computer-usable medium are disclosed for the use of a text simplification in a question answering (QA) system to improve ingestion quality and QA performance. A source corpus is processed to generate a parsed source corpus, which in turn is processed to generate a shadow corpus of simplified text. The parsed source corpus and the shadow corpus are then processed to generate derived data resources. A user query is processed to generate a set of merged candidate answer variants which are in turn processed to generate a corresponding converged feature vector representing each merged candidate answer variant. Feature values associated with each converged feature vector are then used to rank the merged candidate answer variants. A ranked set of merged candidate answer variants is then provided to the user.