US 5,479,563 AGranted

Boundary extracting system from a sentence

AssigneeFujitsu Limited

InventorYukiko Yamaguchi

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

The present invention extracts boundaries from a sentence with no need for linguistic knowledge or complicated grammatical rules. Upon extracting a clause/phrase boundary, words are classified according to part-of-speech numbers of words which form inputted sentence information. Then, an input pattern representing part-of-speech numbers of a target word is checked to determine whether a clause/phrase boundary exists before or after the target word; a plurality of words before and after the target words is then applied to a neural network. Among units in the output layer of the neural network, a unit having the output larger than a threshold is determined to refer to a clause/phrase boundary of the target word. Upon extracting a subject-predicate boundary, words are classified in word number, and an input pattern corresponding to a plurality of words are applied to the neural network. The neural network comprises output units for a subject and a predicate, and a boundary is extracted by an inputted pattern which changes the output of these units.

Claims13

Dependent claims

An intra-sentence boundary extracting system for extracting a boundary in a structure of a sentence located either before or after a target word included in words forming inputted sentence data, said system comprising:

inputted word classifying means for classifying a first number of words forming the inputted sentence data to produce an input pattern indicating a second number of classification results of the words;
and
boundary position data output means for receiving the classification results from said inputted word classifying means and for outputting at least one of clause and phrase boundary position data, said boundary position data output means including a neural network formed of
an input layer having a third number of units, each unit coupled to said inputted word classifying means to receive each part of the input pattern for the first number of words including the target word, n preceding words before the target word and m succeeding words after the target word, where n and m are at least one, the third number corresponding to the first number times the second number of classification results of the words;
more than one intermediate layer coupled to said input layer;
and
an output layer, coupled to at least one of said more than one intermediate layer, to output the boundary position data on the structure of the sentence, corresponding to a boundary of at least one of a clause, a noun phrase, a verb phrase, a preposition phrase and an infinitive phrase either before or after the target word.

4 more elements

An intra-sentence boundary extracting system for extracting a boundary either before or after a word included in a sentence data, said system comprising:

inputted word number retrieving means for receiving inputted sentence data and for retrieving a word number of a target word included in the inputted sentence data;
boundary position data output means for receiving each word number retrieved by said inputted word number retrieving means and for outputting boundary position data, said boundary position data output means including a neural network formed of
an input layer having a first number of units, each unit coupled to said inputted word number retrieving means to receive each word number in an input pattern representing a second number of words including the target word, n preceding words before the target word and m succeeding words after the target word, where n and m are at least one, the first number being equal to the second number times a third number of possible word numbers;
more than one intermediate layer coupled to said input layer;
and
an output layer, coupled to at least one of said more than one intermediate layer, to output the boundary position data indicating a boundary either before or after the target word depending on whether the target word is a subject or a verb;
and
boundary determining means for outputting, according to the boundary position data outputted by said boundary position data output means, a boundary determination result for the target word.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.