Creation of structured data from plain text

Abstract

A method and system for converting plain text into structured data. Parse trees for the plain text are generated based on the grammar of a natural language, the parse trees are mapped on to instance trees generated based on an application-specific model. The best map is chosen, and the instance tree is passing to an application for execution. The method and system can be used both for populating a database and / or for retrieving data from a database based on a query.

Description

[0001]A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.REFERENCE TO A COMPUTER PROGRAM LISTING APPENDIX[0002]A computer program listing appendix is included in the attached CD-R created on Dec. 12, 2000, labeled “Creation of Structured Data from Plain Text,” and including the following files: CommodityProperty.nml (13 KB), DefaultSeg14Result.xml, (2 KB), ElectricalProperty.nml (16 KB), Example.txt, Grammar.txt, INML.xml, (5 KB), MeasurementProperty.nml (22 KB), Output.txt, (3 KB), PeriodProperty.nml (6 KB), PhysicalProperty.nml (36 KB), ReservedNameProperty.nml (6 KB), Seg14.nml (30 KB), Seg14Phrasing.nml (71 KB), UsageProperty.nml (7 KB), and Utility.nml (6 KB). These fil...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The present invention provides a system, method, and architecture for receiving unstructured text, and converting it to structured data. This is done by mapping the grammatical parse of a sentence into an instance tree of application domain objects. The system is portable across different application domains and can be used for creating structured data from plain text, allowing for efficient storing in a database. The system uses a natural language interface, which users interact with by entering natural English sentences, which are then executed by the program. The system also includes a parsing algorithm and a mapping algorithm to extract object representations of the sentence. The reduced form of the NML object description is created as an instance of a Domain Markup Language (“DML”) and is passed to the application program for execution. The technical effects of the invention include improved efficiency in creating structured data from unstructured text and enhanced functionality of applications."

Problems solved by technology

However, grammars which exploit this freedom are computationally intractable.

Unlike most programming languages, however, NML isn't good for printing “hello, world”; rather, it's good for recognizing “hello, world”.

However, Program2 does not quite work to recognize these phrases.

Unlike types in programming languages, however, an object in NML has no real implementation.

The NML document produced the mapper 220 can, however, be too cumbersome for easy processing.

For such sets, the use of IDENTIFIERs is unwieldy: the NML file would be very large and in a state of constant update.

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