Context-aware question answering system

摘要

A question is received to be answered by a question answering (QA) system. The question may be a business intelligence question that is expressed in a natural language. The question is parsed. The parsed question is matched to a pattern from a number of patterns. A technical query associated with the matched pattern is processed to retrieve data relevant to the question from a number of data sources. The QA system generates an answer to the question based on retrieved data. In one aspect, the QA system generates answers based contextual information.

主权项

1. A computer implemented method to generate an answer to a business intelligence (BI) request for information, the method comprising:
receiving the BI request for information expressed in natural language, the BI request is sent by an agent; upon receiving the BI request, loading into a memory a situation graph of the agent, the situation graph representing information contextual to the agent; parsing the BI request; based on the parsed BI request, generating a graph representing syntactic structure of the received BI request; enriching the graph based on the parsed BI request with:
at least one semantic annotation representing at least one business object identified in the BI request, the business object included in a data model that at least in part forms a semantic layer of a plurality of data sources, the data model determines a structure of at least one data source from the plurality of data sources, andat least one semantic annotation representing contextual information derived from the situation graph of the agent; matching the parsed BI request to a pattern from a plurality of patterns of features included in the BI request, wherein features of the pattern include reference to the at least one business object identified in the BI request; processing by the computer a technical query associated with the pattern from the plurality of patterns to retrieve data relevant to the BI request at least from the at least one data source generating the answer to the BI request based on the retrieved data relevant to the BI request and based at least in part on the situation graph of the agent, wherein the answer generated by triggering at least one operator of a situational recommender system; and recommending the generated answer.