Abstract: An information extraction system that allows users to ask questions about documents in a database, and responds to queries by returning possibly relevant information which is extracted from the documents. The system is domain-independent, and automatically builds its own subject knowledge base. It can be applied to any new corpus of text with quick results, and no requirement for lengthy manual input. For this reason, it is also a dynamic system which can acquire new knowledge and add it to the knowledge base immediately by automatically identifying new names, events, or concepts.

Abstract: An information extraction system that allows users to ask questions about documents in a database, and responds to queries by returning possibly relevant information which is extracted from the documents. The system is domain-independent, and automatically builds its own subject knowledge base. It can be applied to any new corpus of text with quick results, and no requirement for lengthy manual input. For this reason, it is also a dynamic system which can acquire new knowledge and add it to the knowledge base immediately by automatically identifying new names, events, or concepts.

Abstract: Techniques for generating sophisticated representations of the contents of both queries and documents in a retrieval system by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to represent, index, and retrieve texts at the multiple levels (e.g., the morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels) at which humans construe meaning in writing. The user enters a query and the system processes the query to generate an alternative representation, which includes conceptual-level abstraction and representations based on complex nominals (CNs), proper nouns (PNs), single terms, text structure, and logical make-up of the query, including mandatory terms. After processing the query, the system displays query information to the user, indicating the system's interpretation and representation of the content of the query. The user is then given an opportunity to provide input, in response to which the system modifies the alternative representation of the query.

Abstract: A document retrieval system where a user can enter a query, including a natural language query, in a desired one of a plurality of supported languages, and retrieve documents from a database that includes documents in at least one other language of the plurality of supported languages. The user need not have any knowledge of the other languages. Each document in the database is subjected to a set of processing steps to generate a language-independent conceptual representation of the subject content of the document. This is normally done before the query is entered. The query is also subjected to a (possibly different) set of processing steps to generate a language-independent conceptual representation of the subject content of the query. The documents and queries can also be subjected to additional analysis to provide additional term-based representations, such as the extraction of information-rich terms and phrases (such as proper nouns).

Abstract: Techniques for generating sophisticated representations of the contents of both queries and documents in a retrieval system by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to represent, index, and retrieve texts at the multiple levels (e.g., the morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels) at which humans construe meaning in writing. The user enters a query and the system processes the query to generate an alternative representation, which includes conceptual-level abstraction and representations based on complex nominals (CNs), proper nouns (PNs), single terms, text structure, and logical make-up of the query, including mandatory terms. After processing the query, the system displays query information to the user, indicating the system's interpretation and representation of the content of the query. The user is then given an opportunity to provide input, in response to which the system modifies the alternative representation of the query.

Abstract: A natural language processing system uses unformatted naturally occurring text and generates a subject vector representation of the text, which may be an entire document or a part thereof such as its title, a paragraph, clause, or a sentence therein. The subject codes which are used are obtained from a lexical database and the subject code(s) for each word in the text is looked up and assigned from the database. The database may be a dictionary or other word resource which has a semantic classification scheme as designators of subject domains. Various meanings or senses of a word may have assigned thereto multiple, different subject codes and psycholinguistically justified sense meaning disambiguation is used to select the most appropriate subject field code. Preferably, an ordered set of sentence level heuristics is used which is based on the statistical probability or likelihood of one of the plurality of codes being the most appropriate one of the plurality.