CONCEPTUAL WORLD REPRESENTATION NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING SYSTEM AND METHOD

• US 20090259459A1
• Filed: 02/13/2009
• Published: 10/15/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 07/12/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Mol, Maarten Van, O'Donnell, Mick, Ceusters, Werner, Montyne, Frank, Coppens, Frederik
• Granted Patent: US 7,917,354 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/35 Clustering; Classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/289 Phrasal analysis, e.g. finite state techniques or chunking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/30 Semantic analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/40 Processing or translation of natural language natural language analysis G06F40/20; semantic analysis G06F40/30
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/02 Knowledge representation; Symbolic representation

Abstract

A Natural Language Understanding system is provided for indexing of free text documents. The system according to the invention utilizes typographical and functional segmentation of text to identify those portions of free text that carry meaning. The system then uses words and multi-word terms and phrases identified in the free to text to identify concepts in the free text. The system uses a lexicon of terms linked to a formal ontology that is independent of a specific language to extract concepts from the free text based on the words and multi-word terms in the free text. The formal ontology contains both language independent domain knowledge concepts and language dependent linguistic concepts that govern the relationships between concepts and contain the rules about how language works. The system according to the current invention may preferably be used to index medical documents and assign codes from independent coding systems, such as, SNOMED, ICD-9 and ICD-10. The system according to the current invention may also preferably make use of syntactic parsing to improve the efficiency of the method.

Claims

1. A computer-readable medium storing code representing instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to:

receive as an input at least a portion of a document;

extract a meaning contained in the portion of the document based on a comparison of the portion to a plurality of concepts included in a computer implemented formal ontology and arranged in a hierarchy, said hierarchy having a primary concept defined based on a set of criteria, each concept from the plurality of concepts hierarchically linked to and below the primary concept being defined based on all criteria from the set of criteria and based on at least one additional criterion different than each criterion from the set of criteria; and

index the portion of the document based on said meaning extracted from the portion of the document.