Systems and methods for concept mapping

A computer-implemented method for identifying concepts relevant to natural language content, the method comprising:

• tokenizing the natural language content into a plurality of tokens;
• identifying within an ontology stored on a computer-readable storage medium, one or more concepts associated with each of the tokens, wherein the ontology is embodied as a graph comprising a plurality of interconnected vertices, wherein each vertex in the graph represents a concept, and wherein interconnections between the concepts in the ontology represent relationships between concepts;
• selecting from the ontology one or more concepts relevant to the natural language content based on the concepts identified using the plurality of tokens and the interconnections in the ontology;
• and
• providing for displaying one or more indicators of related content in connection with the natural language content, wherein the indicators are selected using the relevant concepts.

An apparatus for determining one or more concepts related to natural language content, comprising:

• a computer-readable storage medium comprising an ontology;
• a computing device comprising a processor communicatively coupled to the computer-readable storage medium;
• a tokenizer module operable on the processor, the tokenizer module configured to tokenize the natural language content into a plurality of tokens and to identify within the ontology one or more candidate concepts associated with each of the plurality of tokens;
• and
• a disambiguation module operable on the processor and communicatively coupled to the tokenizer module, wherein the disambiguation module is configured to select one or more concepts related to the natural language content from the ontology using the ontology and the one or more identified concepts.

A computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions to cause a computing device to perform a method for selecting concepts relevant to natural language content using an ontology embodied as a graph of interconnected concepts, the method comprising:

• generating a graph comprising a plurality of candidate concepts for the natural language content using the ontology and a plurality of tokens parsed from the natural language content;
• assigning each of the candidate concepts in the graph an initial activation value;
• spreading the activation values of each of the concepts having an activation value to other concepts within the graph, wherein the activation value of a particular concept is spread to each concept connected to the particular concept in the graph;
• and
• selecting one or more concepts from the graph as representative concepts for the natural language content, wherein the selection of representative concepts is based on activation values of the concepts in the graph.

A system for identifying concepts relevant to natural language content using an ontology comprising a plurality of interconnected concepts, the system comprising:

• a computing device comprising a processor;
• and
• a disambiguation module operable on the processor and configured to select concepts related to the natural language content from the ontology;
• wherein the disambiguation module is configured to select the concepts related to the natural language content by,
• identifying one or more candidate concepts within the ontology using terms from the natural language content,
• applying an activation value to each of the candidate concepts,
• iteratively spreading the activation values to concepts within the ontology based on the connections between the concepts in the ontology, and
• selecting the concepts related to the natural language content using activation values of the concepts in the ontology.

A computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions to cause a computing device to perform a method for selecting related concepts from a graph comprising a plurality of vertices, each vertex representing a concept in an ontology, wherein the vertices are interconnected by a plurality of edges, and wherein the interconnections between the vertices are determined by the ontology, the method comprising:

• assigning an activation value to one or more of the vertices in the graph;
• iteratively spreading the activation values of each of the vertices in the graph to other vertices in the graph until a completion criteria is satisfied, wherein spreading the activation value of a first vertex in the graph comprises incrementing an activation value of each vertex in the graph that is connected to the first vertex and that is within a predetermined number of generations of the first vertex in the graph;
• selecting one or more concepts from the graph based upon the activation values of the concepts within the graph;
• and
• indexing the natural language content using the relevant concepts.

A computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions to cause a computing device to perform a method, comprising:

• crawling one or more knowledge sources;
• identifying within the one or more knowledge sources a plurality of related concepts;
• constructing an ontology using the plurality of related concepts, the ontology comprising a plurality of interconnected concepts;
• and
• using the ontology to identify concepts relevant to natural language content.