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Abstract

A help interface capable of receiving user-defined queries in a natural language and selecting the most appropriate answer from a plurality of potential answers, includes facilities for parsing and storing the character string content of the query in a buffer. Lists of punctuation characters as well as single and multiple word character strings are successively compared with the content of the buffer to eliminate punctuation, superfluous words, location reference words, and to identify synonyms to base words meaningful in the selection of an appropriate answer. The identified base words are used as references into a predefined rule set which inherently matches the base word with a potential answer and assigns a value based on the relationship of the potential answer to the base word. The cumulative values of all potential answers are computed and ranked with the highest ranking value presented to the user as a response to the query.

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First Claim