Evaluating temporal relevance in question answering

摘要

Mechanisms are provided for evaluating a temporal relevance of a candidate answer to an input natural language question. An input natural language question is received and analyzed to identify a temporal focus of the input natural language question. A corpus of documents is processed based on the input natural language question to generate candidate answers to the input natural language question, where each candidate answer is processed to identify at least one contextual temporal focus associated with the candidate answer. The at least one contextual temporal focus is compared with the temporal focus of the input natural language question and a measure of temporal relevance of the candidate answer based on results of the comparison is generated. A final answer to the input natural language question is output based on the measure of temporal relevance.