Methods and apparatus for evaluating semantic proximity

1. A computer-implemented method for evaluating a semantic proximity between a question consisting of a string of natural language text presented in a candidate free-form text request received from a user, and a reference free-form text entry consisting of a string of natural language text, comprising:

providing a plurality of reference free-form text entries in a data store, each entry in the form of a question expressed as a string of natural language text associated with an answer to the question;

receiving a candidate free-form text request from a user work station in the form of a query expressed as a string of natural language text;

processing the string of natural language text expressed in each reference free-form text entry into a plurality of reference rephrased objects, each reference rephrased object containing a variation of the string of natural language text expressed in the reference free-form text entry and an expression of the semantic proximity between the variation of the string of natural language text contained in the reference rephrased object and the string of natural language text expressed in the reference free-form text entry;

processing the string of natural language text expressed in the candidate free-form text request into a plurality of user rephrased objects, each user rephrased object containing a variation of the string of natural language text expressed in the candidate free-form text request and an expression of the semantic proximity between the variation of the string of natural language text contained in the user rephrased object and the string of natural language text expressed in the candidate free-form text request;

matching at least one of the reference rephrased objects derived from the processing of the reference free-form text entry with at least one user rephrased objects derived from the processing of the candidate free-form text request;

for each matching reference rephrased object and user rephrased object, calculating a combined semantic proximity;

selecting the reference rephrased object associated with the highest combined semantic proximity; and

displaying the answer associated with the selected reference rephrased object on the user work station.

2. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the reference rephrased objects and the user rephrased objects use the same data structure.

3. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the processing applied to convert a reference free-form text entry into the list of reference rephrased objects is the same as the processing applied to convert a candidate free-form text request into a list of user rephrased objects.

4. The method according to claim 1 , further including:

providing a reference answer to the user based on calculating the combined semantic proximity associated with each matching reference rephrased object and user rephrased object.

5. The method according to claim 1 , wherein a reference rephrased object contains text, and an expression of the semantic proximity between the reference rephrased object and the information expressed in the reference free-form text entry comprises:

a percentage of how similar the text in the reference rephrased object is to the information expressed in the reference free-form text entry.

6. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the expression of the semantic proximity between the variation of the string of natural language text contained in the reference rephrased object and the string of natural language text expressed in the reference free-form text entry is expressed as a percentage.

7. The method according to claim 6 , wherein calculating the combined semantic proximity comprises multiplying the percentages of the matched reference rephrased object and user rephrased object.