IDENTIFICATION OF SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN REPORTED SPEECH

• US 20150019558A1
• Filed: 09/26/2014
• Published: 01/15/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 08/31/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Zhigu Holdings Limited
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: CROUCH, RICHARD S., VAN DEN BERG, MARTIN HENK, AHN, DAVID, GUREVICH, OLGA, PELL, BARNEY D., POLANYI, LIVIA, PREVOST, SCOTT A., THIONE, GIOVANNI LORENZO
• Granted Patent: US 9,449,081 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/739
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/313 Selection or weighting of terms for indexing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/316 Indexing structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3344 using natural language analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/35 Clustering; Classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems

Abstract

Methods and computer-readable media for associating words or groups of words distilled from content, such as reported speech or an attitude report, of a document to form semantic relationships collectively used to generate a semantic representation of the content are provided. Semantic representations may include elements identified or parsed from a text portion of the content, the elements of which may be associated with other elements that share a semantic relationship, such as an agent, location, or topic relationship. Relationships may also be developed by associating one element that is in relation to, or is about, another element, thereby allowing for rapid and effective comparison of associations found in a semantic representation with associations derived from queries. The semantic relationships may be determined based on semantic information, such as potential meanings and grammatical functions of each element within the text portion of the content.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for, in response to receiving a query, creating associations between various terms distilled from the query to generate a proposition, the proposition being used to interrogate semantic representations of content from documents stored in a semantic index to provide relevant search results, the method comprising:

determining semantic information for one or more search terms;

identifying a first reporting act within the query;

based on the determined semantic information for the one or more search terms, determining a semantic relationship between the first reporting act and at least one of the one or more search terms, thereby creating an association by way of a relational element that describes the semantic relationship; and

generating the proposition, the proposition including the association between the first reporting act and the at least one of the one or more search terms.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

parsing the query to determine the one or more search terms therein.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the semantic information includes one or more of meanings of the identified elements or grammatical functions of the identified elements.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

associating with each of the one or more search terms a plurality of words having a similar meaning to the at least one of the one or more search terms.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the proposition is a logical representation of a meaning of the query that is used to interrogate semantic relationships contained within semantic representations of content from the documents.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

identifying a second reporting act within the query; and

based on the determined semantic information for the one or more search terms, determining a semantic relationship between the second reporting act and the at least one of the one or more search terms, thereby creating an association by way of a relational element that describes the semantic relationship.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

comparing the proposition against one or more of the semantic representations stored in the semantic index to determine one or more matching pairs.