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Abstract

An information server directs users of the information server to desired sources of information where the desired sources of information are determined, at least in part, based on user input. The information server includes a query input processor, a question processor and an answer processor. The query input processor is used for accepting an initial user query. The question processor processes the initial user query to identify a set of possible well-formed questions selected from the question database, where a well-formed question is a question in the database that is coupled to at least one answer reference. The answer reference is typically either an answer or a pointer to a possible location of an answer. In a specific embodiment, the information server is coupled to the Internet so that users can pose questions using a Web browser from any Internet-connected device. In some systems, the question processor includes a tokenizer for tokenizing the initial user query into a list of words, a parser for generating a syntactic structure from the list of words, a normalizer for reducing the syntactic structure to a canonical syntactic structure, and a matcher for matching the canonical syntactic structure against a semantic network to obtain a weighted list of well-formed questions representative of possible semantic meanings for the initial user query.

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First Claim