US Patent Issued to Microsoft Technology Licensing on March 18 for "Searching and locating answers to natural language questions in tables within documents" (Washington Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,254,034, issued on March 18, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Searching and locating answers to natural language questions in tables within documents" was invented by Sarah Panda (Bothell, Wash.), Arindam Mitra (Redmond, Wash.) and Liang Du (Redmond, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present disclosure relates to methods and systems for searching and finding one or more tables that contain an answer to a query within documents. The methods and systems receive the query with query terms and search a table index for one or more related tables to the query terms. The methods and systems locate an...