System and method for domain-independent terminology linking

An automatic terminology linking system for automatically linking terminology to nodes of a knowledge base, the system comprising:

• a processor configured to:
• identify candidate nodes for each terminology that is to be linked to a node of the knowledge base using occurrence statistics, wherein each terminology determined to have no candidates is identified as candidate-less terminology;
• identify pseudo-candidate nodes for the candidate-less terminology that is to be linked to a node of the knowledge base, the pseudo-candidate nodes being semantically-related to candidate-less terminology;
• respectively score the candidate nodes and the pseudo-candidate nodes by collective inference using occurrence statistics and co-occurrence statistics for nodes of the knowledge base corresponding to the candidates and pseudo-candidates,
• link each terminology to the node of the knowledge base corresponding to the highest-scored candidate node for the terminology;
• and
• link each candidate-less terminology to the node of the knowledge base corresponding to the highest-scored pseudo-candidate for the candidate-less terminology,
• wherein the occurrence statistics indicate probability that a terminology is linked to a respective node of the knowledge base, and
• wherein the co-occurrence statistics indicate (i) a probability that two terminologies appear in a same document or (ii) a probability that two nodes of the knowledge based are linked to by a same document.