Patent ID: 8275608

Claim:
An annotation method comprising: identifying named entities in a corpus together with contexts wherein the identifying of each named entity identifies the named entity as a noun or noun phrase starting with an upper-case letter; grouping the named entities into cliques based on mutual context similarity, each clique including a plurality of different named entities each named entity being a noun or noun phrase starting with an upper-case letter, the named entities of each clique having mutual context similarity, the grouping of the named entities into cliques being non-exclusive in that a named entity can belong to more than one clique; clustering the cliques to generate named entity groups each named entity group consisting of one or more cliques, the clustering being performed on the basis of mutual similarity of the contexts of the named entities constituting the cliques; assigning annotations to the named entity groups; and annotating named entity instances in the corpus based on the named entity groups and corresponding assigned annotations; wherein at least the identifying, the grouping, and the clustering are performed by a computer.