System and methods for automatically identifying answerable questions

摘要

A system and method for classifying questions in an information retrieval system as answerable and unanswerable. A model is provided on a machine-learning system derived from a training set of questions A test question is provided for classification, and the test question is classified as answerable or unanswerable by application of said model to said test question. In order to enhance accuracy and robustness of the system, a class-based smoothing technique is provided which maps phrases to domain-specific concepts and semantic types.