Patent ID: 8010342

Claim:
A computer searchably provided with, or connected to, a corpus, which is a usage example database containing example sentences for a plurality of target vocabulary terms having the same or similar meaning, and a thesaurus, which is a database describing the word-to-word relationship between one word and another within a conceptual hierarchy, a word use difference information acquisition program for extracting and outputting information relating to the difference in usage for a plurality of target terms having the same or similar meaning, said word use difference information acquisition program configured to cause the computer to execute processing comprising: a target word inputting step of receiving the input of a plurality of target words, a sentence extracting step for accessing the corpus, searching the corpus for each target word for which input thereof has been received in the target word inputting step, and extracting from the corpus each sentence data containing any of said target words, a noun extracting step for analyzing the structure of each sentence data extracted in the sentence extracting step, and extracting from each sentence data nouns that exist in a grammatical relationship with the target word contained therein, a directional graph forming step for accessing the thesaurus, searching the thesaurus for the nouns extracted in the noun extracting step, extracting a node representing each of said nouns and a node representing the higher ranking conceptual category with respect to each said noun, and forming a directional graph constructed from the thus extracted nodes and links that connect respective higher and lower ranking nodes and show the relationship therebetween with respect to the conceptual hierarchy, for each corresponding target word, a difference extracting step for comparing each of the directional graphs formed in the directional graph forming step, and extracting the difference nodes between the directional graphs of different target words, and a difference outputting step for outputting the difference between the directional graphs extracted in the difference extracting step as information representing difference in usage between the target words.