A method for building a
knowledge base containing entailment relations, includingproviding at least one input pattern (p) with N pattern slots (N>1), the input pattern (p) expressing a specific
semantic relation between N entities that fill the N pattern slots of the input pattern (p) as slot fillers,providing at least one cluster (c) of articles, the articles of the cluster (c) relating to a common main topic;
processing the articles with respect to the input pattern (p) and identifying the identities which match the semantic type of the N pattern slots;if the at least one input pattern matches a portion of an article (a) of the at least one cluster (c):storing the N slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN), which match the slots of the pattern (p), and a cluster identifier Ic of the cluster (c) into a first table S, wherein the N-tuple (s1, s2, . . . , sN) and the cluster identifier Ic of the associated cluster (c) form one element of the table S;for each element of table S, identifying appearances of the slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN) in a plurality of articles of cluster (c) and for each appearance so identified, storing the slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN) together with the
sentence in which they occur into a second table C0;from the sentences stored in table C0, extracting patterns which span over the corresponding N slot fillers (s1, s2, . . . , sN), the extracted pattern expressing a
semantic relation between the N slot fillers; andstoring the extracted pattern together with the input pattern as entailment relation into the
knowledge base.