International Business Machines Corporation
Extracting important sentences from documents to answer hypothesis that include causes and consequences

Abstract:

A method is provided for validating a hypothesis sentence. The method extracts, from a document database D using a hypothesis sentence that includes a causal part and a consequence part, a set D1 of documents related to the causal part. The method extracts, from set D1, a set S of sentences that include expressions of opinion. The method obtains a word list W of words that have a high co-occurrence in the set D1. The method selects, from the set S, a set S1 of sentences that are positionally close to any of the words in the word list W. The method selects, from the set S, a set S2 of sentences that are related to the words in the consequence part of the hypothesis. The method extracts and displays sentences included in both the set S1 and the set S2 as opinion sentences in relation to the hypothesis sentence.