Patent ID: 7689411

Claim:
A method for developing a system for retrieving text related to a selected concept within a text corpus, the method comprising: identifying a set of at least three semantic classes which in combinations thereof express the concept, each of the semantic classes expressing a constituent notion of the concept; identifying a set of keywords for each of the semantic classes to be used in text searching in a text corpus, each set of keywords including at least one user-selected keyword, at least some of the semantic classes including keywords which are used in relevant expressions in retrieved text when the constituent notion is being conveyed and including keywords having different meanings from other keywords of the same semantic class and which are not synonymous with the other keywords; establishing, with a processing unit of a computer system, a plurality of syntactic rules to be applied to retrieved text which includes keywords, each of the syntactic rules identifying a first of the set of semantic classes and a second of the set of semantic classes, the rule being satisfied when any keyword from the first of the semantic classes is in a syntactic relationship with any keyword from the second of the semantic classes, the syntactic relationship comprising any one of a plurality of syntactic relationships.