SYSTEM AND METHOD TO PROVIDE WARNINGS ASSOCIATED WITH NATURAL LANGUAGE SEARCHES TO DETERMINE INTENDED ACTIONS AND ACCIDENTAL OMISSIONS

• US 20090306962A1
• Filed: 06/06/2008
• Published: 12/10/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 06/06/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines SA (International Business Machines Corporation)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Harlow, Robert J., Smith, Jeffrey J., Windell, David T.
• Granted Patent: US 8,074,171 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/284 Lexical analysis, e.g. tokenisation or collocates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/289 Phrasal analysis, e.g. finite state techniques or chunking

Abstract

A method for providing notification of content potentially omitted from within an active document in a document preparation application comprises defining a natural language model for a set of phrasal forms associating each phrasal form with a content type; parsing a textual content of the active document to generate one or more natural language tokens; accessing the natural language model to identify each of the one or more natural language tokens that matches with a phrasal form; generating a list of expected content items having an expected content item for each of the one or more natural language tokens that matches with a phrasal form; scanning the active document to attempt to locate each expected content item; and displaying a notification of each expected content item not located. Each expected content item is generated based upon the content type associated with the corresponding matching phrasal form in the natural language model.

Claims

1. A method for providing notification of content potentially omitted from within an active document in a document preparation application executing on a computer system having a display, the method comprising:

defining a natural language model for a set of phrasal forms associating each phrasal form in the set of phrasal forms with a content type;

parsing a textual content of the active document to generate one or more natural language tokens;

accessing the natural language model to identify each of the one or more natural language tokens that matches with a phrasal form in the set of phrasal forms;

generating a list of expected content items having an expected content item for each of the one or more natural language tokens that matches with a phrasal form in the set of phrasal forms, each expected content item being generated based upon the content type associated with the corresponding matching phrasal form in the natural language model;

scanning the active document to attempt to locate each expected content item in the list of expected content items; and

displaying a notification of each expected content item in the list of expected content items not located within the active document on the display.