US Patent 9063975 Results of question and answer systems

Mechanisms are provided for answering questions about at least one previous execution of a question answering (QA) system on a previous input question. An input question is received that is directed to a previous execution of a QA system with regard to a previous input question. The input question is processed to generate at least one query for application to a corpus of information, which comprises information about the QA system and the previous execution of the QA system on the previous input question. The at least one query is applied to the corpus of information to generate candidate answers to the input question which are ranked according to confidence measure values associated with the candidate answers. A final answer for the input question is output based on the ranking of the candidate answers.