Patent US 5,384,894

A system provides question answering based on fuzzy logic. The proposed system provides the capability to assess if a database contains information pertinent to a subject of interest by evaluating each comment in the database via a fuzzy evaluator which attributes a fuzzy membership value indicating its relationship to such subject. An assessment is provided for the database as a whole regarding its pertinence to the subject of interest, and consequently comments that are considered as irrelevant to the subject may be discarded. The system has been developed for the examination of databases and evaluated by testing against those which were created for assessing whether computer system development databases contain information pertinent to the functional changes that would occur in the development cycle. The system can be applied with minimal changes to a variety of circumstances provided that the fundamental assumptions for the development of the membership functions are respected for the application.