Press ReleasesTina Miteko INQUIRA AWARDED PATENT FOR INTELLIGENT SEARCH TECHNOLOGY Enabling a Conversational Experience with Support for Implicit References SAN BRUNO, Calif. – May 18, 2006 -- InQuira Inc., a provider of integrated software applications for intelligent search, knowledge management, analytics and user experience, announced today that it has been issued U.S. patent 6,957,213 for inventing an intelligent means to respond to natural language questions with implicit references. An implicit reference can be a pronoun such as “it, he, she, they”, or a generalization, such as “country” or “president”, referring to the subject of a prior question. The patent is entitled “Method of utilizing implicit references to answer a query”, and includes 28 separate claims. The invention allows a user to present a series of questions in a conversational style, such as “Is the Insight available in red”, followed by “How much does it cost”, and “What’s its mpg”, with the InQuira search engine understanding that “it” refers to the Honda Insight car from the first question. With this capability, users experience a more intelligent, natural language conversation unlike more typical discrete question/answer pairs. "InQuira’s natural language processing technology is the deepest and most complete implementation available, and we have a number of pending applications to protect our intellectual property," said Edwin Cooper, InQuira's chief scientist. "Our support for implicit references is one of many ways in which we are leveraging our innovations to optimize the customer experience." About InQuira For a 2-minute overview of the InQuira platform, click here.
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