Patent ID: 7136806

Claim:
A sentence segmentation method of using a computer to break text in a natural language into sentences, comprising the steps of: inputting the text to be processed, breaking the text into sentences through the use of dictionary data stored in a dictionary storage, and storing the broken text in memory; and reading said text to be processed from said memory, estimating the part of speech of a word constituting said text, and performing sentence segmentation processing on said text based on the result of the part-of-speech estimation; wherein said sentence segmentation processing comprises determining whether said text should be broken, depending on a positional relationship between a word containing a period and a main verb in said text, said word and said main verb being determined based on the result of said part-of-speech estimation; wherein said sentence segmentation processing further comprises determining whether a verb should be treated as a main verb, based on the positional relationship between a subordinate conjunction or a relative pronoun and said verb in said text.