US Patent 10346415 Determining question and answer alternatives

A computer-implemented method can include identifying one or more candidate topics from a query. The method can generate, for each candidate topic, a candidate topic-answer pair that includes both the candidate topic and an answer to the query for the candidate topic. The method can obtain search results based on the query, wherein one or more of the search results references an annotated resource. For each candidate topic-answer pair, the method can determine a score for the candidate topic-answer pair for use in determining a response to the query, based on (i) an occurrence of the candidate topic in the annotations of the resources referenced by one or more of the search results, and (ii) an occurrence of the answer in annotations of the resources referenced by the one or more search results, or in the resources referenced by the one or more search results.