US Patent 9613025 Natural language question answering system and method, and paraphrase module

A natural language question answering system and method, and a paraphrase module are provided. The natural language question answering system includes a conversion module configured to generate a plurality of modified questions by paraphrasing a user's question; a plurality of question answering engines configured to receive each of the user's question and the modified questions, and select candidate answers corresponding to each of the user's question and the modified questions; and a detection module configured to detect at least one among the selected candidate answers as an answer.