International Business Machines Corporation
Time-based optimization of answer generation in a question and answer system

Abstract:

Mechanisms are provided for generating an answer to an input question. The mechanisms process a received input question to identify a temporal categorization of the input question indicating an intended time context for an answer to the input question. The input question does not specify a temporal categorization of the input question. The mechanisms perform analysis of a corpus of information based on the temporal categorization of the input question and temporal categorizations of sources of information in the corpus of information to determine, for each source of information, a degree of correspondence of the temporal categorization of the input question to a temporal categorization of the source of information. An answer to the input question is generated and output based on the degrees of correspondence of the sources of information.