Patent ID: 7398201

Claim:
A method in a computer system for transforming at least one sentence of a document or a query into a canonical representation using entity tags, comprising: receiving a designation of a plurality of entity tags, each entity tag having a type and a value, wherein the type of each entity tag is a possible attribute of a sentence that does not represent a part-of-speech and does not represent a grammatical role; and for each sentence, parsing the sentence to generate a parse structure having a plurality of syntactic elements that correspond to parts-of-speech; determining from the syntactic elements of the parse structure a set of terms that correspond to one or more of the designated entity tags; and for each term of one or more terms of the determined set of terms, storing in an enhanced data representation data structure a representation of an association between the term and a corresponding entity tag, the representation including the term and an indication of the type of the corresponding entity tag, wherein the term is the value of the corresponding entity tag, such that the sentence is represented in the data structure by at least one entity tag.