Developing fault model from unstructured text documents

A method for creating a fault model for a vehicle or a vehicle sub-system, said method comprising:

• providing a text verbatim document from a customer or a service technician, said document containing diagnostic information about the vehicle or the vehicle sub-system;
• extracting descriptive terms from the text verbatim document using an ontology and heuristic rules;
• classifying the descriptive terms into types, where the types include Diagnostic Trouble Code (DTC) symptoms, non-DTC symptoms, failure modes, and parts;
• merging phrases in the descriptive terms which mean the same thing but are worded differently;
• and
• assembling the fault model from the descriptive terms.

A system for creating a fault model, said system comprising:

• means for providing an unstructured text document containing diagnostic information about a hardware or software system;
• means for extracting descriptive terms from the unstructured text document using an ontology and heuristic rules;
• means for classifying the descriptive terms into types;
• means for merging phrases in the descriptive terms which mean the same thing but are worded differently;
• and
• means for assembling the fault model from the descriptive terms.