Google Was Recently Granted a Patent on Answer-Seeking Queries and How to Answer Them

Google was recently granted a patent focusing on answer-seeking queries and providing good answers to such queries.

This patent focuses on how a search system can learn the characteristic elements of answer-seeking queries and answers to answer-seeking queries.. Some of the key points include

• Search systems may make use of various subsystems to obtain resources relevant to a query. Some of these can be
  • a search system can maintain a knowledge base that stores information about various entities and provide information about the entities when a search query references the alias of an entity.
  • a part-of-speech tagger. The part-of-speech tagger analyzes terms in a query and classifies each term as a particular part of speech, e.g., a noun, verb, or direct object.
  • a root word identifier. Given a particular query, the root wood identifier can classify a term in the query as a root word, which is a word that does not depend on any other words in the query. For example, in the query “how to cook lasagna,” a root word identifier can determine that “cook” is the root word of the query.
• Search systems may make use of technologies relating to classifying queries as answer-seeking and generating answers to answer-seeking queries. An answer-seeking query is a query issued by a user who seeks a concise answer. For example, “when was George Washington born” would be classified by a system as an answer-seeking query because the system can determine that it is likely that a user who issues it seeks a concise answer, e.g., “Feb. 22, 1732.”

Head over to Bill’s post on the full breakdown.