[Corpora-List] Patent application for using an ontology in "natural language understanding"

[John F. Sowa]

I received an offline note that pointed to another application
by Werner Ceusters et al., which is broad enough to cover any use
of "concepts included in a computer implemented formal ontology and 
arranged in a hierarchy."

They filed this application as a continuation to the previously
granted patent that used conceptual graphs.  But they broadened
it to a cover a wider range of systems.  (See excerpts below.)

Note that there is a little dialog box at the end of the web page
at the URL below.  It allows people to comment on this so-called
invention.

Anybody who knows of relevant prior art might use that dialog
box to send them a message.  I don't know what effect those
comments might have, but I hope that they might influence
the patent examiners.

John Sowa
___________________________________________________________________

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090259459

Patent application title: CONCEPTUAL WORLD REPRESENTATION NATURAL 
LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING SYSTEM AND METHOD

Inventors:  Werner Ceusters  Mick O'Donnell  Frank Montyne  Frederik 
Coppens  Maarten Van Mol

Patent application number: 20090259459

Abstract:

A Natural Language Understanding system is provided for indexing of free 
text documents. The system according to the invention utilizes 
typographical and functional segmentation of text to identify those 
portions of free text that carry meaning. The system then uses words and 
multi-word terms and phrases identified in the free to text to identify 
concepts in the free text. The system uses a lexicon of terms linked to 
a formal ontology that is independent of a specific language to extract 
concepts from the free text based on the words and multi-word terms in 
the free text. The formal ontology contains both language independent 
domain knowledge concepts and language dependent linguistic concepts 
that govern the relationships between concepts and contain the rules 
about how language works. The system according to the current invention 
may preferably be used to index medical documents and assign codes from 
independent coding systems, such as, SNOMED, ICD-9 and ICD-10. The 
system according to the current invention may also preferably make use 
of syntactic parsing to improve the efficiency of the method.

Claims:

1. A computer-readable medium storing code representing instructions 
that when executed by a computer cause the computer to:receive as an 
input at least a portion of a document;extract a meaning contained in 
the portion of the document based on a comparison of the portion to a 
plurality of concepts included in a computer implemented formal ontology 
and arranged in a hierarchy, said hierarchy having a primary concept 
defined based on a set of criteria, each concept from the plurality of 
concepts hierarchically linked to and below the primary concept being 
defined based on all criteria from the set of criteria and based on at 
least one additional criterion different than each criterion from the 
set of criteria; andindex the portion of the document based on said 
meaning extracted from the portion of the document.

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