Method for the extraction of relation patterns from articles

Abstract

A method for building a knowledge base containing entailment relations, including providing at least one input pattern (p) with N pattern slots (N>1), the input pattern (p) expressing a specific semantic relation between N entities that fill the N pattern slots of the input pattern (p) as slot fillers, providing at least one cluster (c) of articles, the articles of the cluster (c) relating to a common main topic; processing the articles with respect to the input pattern (p) and identifying the identities which match the semantic type of the N pattern slots; if the at least one input pattern matches a portion of an article (a) of the at least one cluster (c): storing the N slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN), which match the slots of the pattern (p), and a cluster identifier Ic of the cluster (c) into a first table S, wherein the N-tuple (s1, s2, . . . , sN) and the cluster identifier Ic of the associated cluster (c) form one element of the table S; for each element of table S, identifying appearances of the slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN) in a plurality of articles of cluster (c) and for each appearance so identified, storing the slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN) together with the sentence in which they occur into a second table C0; from the sentences stored in table C0, extracting patterns which span over the corresponding N slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN), the extracted pattern expressing a semantic relation between the N slot fillers; and storing the extracted pattern together with the input pattern as entailment relation into the knowledge base.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.