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AmazonGranted patentAI & softwareInterest 8/10

Amazon patents system that cites sources for AI answers

Patent drawing
Patent drawing from the official filing.

Amazon describes a system that answers user questions by searching a specific database of documents rather than relying on general training data. It matches the question to relevant text chunks, generates an answer with a language model, and identifies the specific document where the information came from.

Why it mattersThis approach helps users verify the accuracy of AI-generated answers by providing direct links to the original source material.

In the filing’s own words

A user provides a question to be answered from detailed, dense or otherwise complex documents to a processing system that converts the question to a structured query language query and generates an embedding from the question, augmented by temporal data, synopses, themes, or other relevant information or data. The embedding is compared to embeddings generated from documents of a knowledge base to identify documents that are relevant to the question, and to rank such documents for their relevance. Highly ranking documents are combined with the query and provided to a language model that returns an answer to the question. A source for the answer is identified in at least one of the documents. The answer and the identified documents are presented to the user.

What exactly they claim (claim 1)

1. A system operating on a provider network, wherein the system comprises: one or more computer processors; at least one data store having a knowledge base comprising a plurality of documents stored thereon; a language model executed by the one or more computer processors, wherein the language model is trained based at least in part on a corpus of data, and wherein the corpus of data does not include any of the plurality of documents; and a service executed by the one or more computer processors, wherein the service is configured to perform operations comprising: receiving at least a free-form description of a question from a user; converting the free-form description of the question to a first query; determining a comparison of an embedding generated based at least in part on the first query to each of a plurality of embeddings, wherein each of the plurality of embeddings is generated based on one of a plurality of text chunks extracted from at least one document in a selected domain and augmented with temporal metadata, and wherein the embedding and each of the plurality of embeddings is in a common vector space; selecting at least a subset of the plurality of text chunks based at least in part on a similarity analysis; generating, using a large language model, a first response to the question based at least in part on the subset of the plurality of text chunks, wherein the first response comprises a first set of data points identified based at least in part on the temporal metadata; identifying one of the plurality of documents including at least one of the first set of data points identified based at least in part on the temporal metadata; and providing the first response to the question and the one of the plurality of documents to the user.

Facts

Company
Amazon (Amazon Technologies, Inc.)
Official title
Verification and citation for language model outputs
Patent number
US12748802B1
Application number
19261796
Filed
Jul 7, 2025
Granted
Sep 29, 2026
Inventors
8
Claims
20

Classified under

G06F 16/383 Physics & computingG06F 16/332 Physics & computingG06F 16/3344 Physics & computingG06Q 50/18 Physics & computing

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Summaries are simplified from the filing’s own abstract and first claim. A patent filing is not a product announcement.
Patent data and drawings: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Nebula is not affiliated with or endorsed by the USPTO.