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

[0040]A system in accordance with the present invention can be used for creating structured data from plain text, to allow for the efficient storing this structured data in a database. For example, from the free text description of a number of products, the structured data (which could be an extracted object and its attributes) can be used to create individual entries in a product database, and thus create content for an ecommerce website or web market. Alternately, or in addition, such a system can be used for creating structured data from a plain text query, for using this structured data to retrieve relevant data from a database. For example, a user's free text query can be converted to a database query that corresponds to the objects of the database and their attributes. Such a system overcomes the limitations of conventional search engines by accepting free form text, and mapping it accurately into a structured search query.

[0043]In one embodiment, the present invention transforms an English sentence into a set of software objects that are subsequently passed to the given application for execution. One of the advantages of this approach is the ability to attach a natural language interface to any software application with minimal developer effort. The objects of the application domain are captured, in one embodiment, by using the Natural Markup Language (“NML”). The resulting interface is robust and intuitive, as the user now interacts with an application by entering normal English sentences, which are then executed by the program. In addition, an application enhanced with the present invention significantly augments the functionality available to a user.

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.

Images