IHS Inc., a global source of critical information and insight, has announced that it has been granted a new patent for the question-answering technology behind its IHS Goldfire software, used by companies to accelerate research and power innovation.
Patent No. 8,666,730, labeled "Question-Answering System and Method Based on Semantic Labeling of Text Documents and User Questions," further extends more than two decades of leadership by IHS Goldfire in precision search technologies. The patent was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on March 4, 2014 and is valid through March 2030.
The patent covers the semantic concept "lenses" that IHS Goldfire use to accelerate research. The lenses correlate with the human knowledge system, organizing and presenting answers to engineers' or scientists' questions – even questions they did not think to ask. These lenses surface concepts in documents' text, enabling users to rapidly explore a concept's definitions, applications, advantages, disadvantages and more.
Unlike today's textual, question-answering technologies, which work as meta-search engines to search for text fragments by keyword and then try to extract answers similar to the text fragment, the IHS Goldfire approach is entirely unique – providing relevant answers, not lists of largely irrelevant documents. With IHS Goldfire, hundreds of different document types can be parsed by a semantic processor to extract semantic relationships like subject-action-object, cause-and-effect and dozens more. Answer-extraction patterns are then applied on top of the semantic data extracted from documents and answers are saved to a searchable database.
Studies show that engineers and other technical professionals can spend a third or more of their time looking for information scattered across numerous information sources. IHS Goldfire gives users a single-point-of-access to standards, patents, technical journals, enterprise data and more as well as the ability to look across that knowledge for answers and insights. The concept lenses of IHS Goldfire dramatically improve upon current research practices which are time consuming, labor intensive and limited to the user's own experience and understanding of where to look for answers, drastically cutting research time.
