US Patent 10521422 Question pre-processing in a question and answer system

Mechanisms are provided for assembling natural language user inputs into questions for a question-and-answer (QA) system. The mechanisms initialize a timer to a threshold amount of time, receive a first input of content-bearing natural language from a user computing device, and initiate running of the timer in response. The mechanisms determine whether a second input of content-bearing natural language is received from the user computing device prior to the threshold amount of time being reached by the timer. If so, the second input is grouped with the first input to generate a question comprising content of both the first input and the second input, and the timer is reset. In response to the timer reaching the threshold without further input from the user computing device, the question is provided to the QA system as an input question for processing by the QA system.