US 11,860,912 B2
Answerability-aware open-domain question answering
Lucas Ross, Royal Oak, MI (US); and Romil Shah, Ann Arbor, MI (US)
Assigned to Ford Global Technologies, LLC, Dearborn, MI (US)
Filed by Ford Global Technologies, LLC, Dearborn, MI (US)
Filed on Mar. 25, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/212,422.
Prior Publication US 2022/0309086 A1, Sep. 29, 2022
Int. Cl. G06F 16/332 (2019.01); G06F 16/33 (2019.01); G06F 16/338 (2019.01)
CPC G06F 16/3329 (2019.01) [G06F 16/338 (2019.01); G06F 16/3344 (2019.01)] 25 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A system, comprising:
an input interface to receive input indicating a question;
a communication module to establish a communication link with an access network, wherein the communication link provides connectivity to one or more packet data networks (PDNs) via the access network; and
a computer coupled to the input interface and the communication module, the computer including a processor and a memory, the memory storing instructions executable by the processor to:
execute an information retrieval procedure including:
accessing an open-domain context search space of the one or more PDNs;
retrieve, from among a plurality of contexts of the open-domain context search space, a plurality of candidate contexts for answering the question using a question-answering model for open-domain question answering;
identify a set of non-answering contexts among the plurality of candidate contexts, wherein each of the set of non-answering contexts is a respective context for which the question-answering model predicts the question to be unanswerable;
determine an open-domain unanswerability score for the question based on respective relevance scores for the set of non-answering contexts;
determine an open-domain result for the question based on the open-domain unanswerability score for the question;
determine a set of adjusted unanswerability scores including a respective adjusted unanswerability score for each of the set of non-answering contexts;
determine the open-domain unanswerability score for the question based on the set of adjusted unanswerability scores; and
output result information indicating the open-domain result for the question.