Patent ID: 7283951

Claim:
A method in a computer system for transforming at least one sentence of a document or a query into a canonical representation, each sentence having a plurality of terms, comprising: for each sentence, parsing the sentence to generate a parse structure having a plurality of syntactic elements; determining a set of meaningful terms of the sentence from the syntactic elements; determining from the structure of the parse structure and the syntactic elements a grammatical role for each meaningful term in the set of meaningful terms, wherein the grammatical role is at least one of a subject, object, verb, part of a prepositional phrase, noun modifier, or verb modifier; determining an additional grammatical role for at least one of the meaningful terms, such that the at least one meaningful term is associated with at least two different grammatical roles, wherein the additional grammatical role is not determined from the parse structure and the additional grammatical role indicates that the at least one of the meaningful terms is a subject or an object in addition to the grammatical role determined from the parse structure; and storing in an enhanced data representation data structure a representation of each association between a meaningful term and its determined grammatical roles, in a manner that indicates a grammatical relationship between a plurality of the meaningful terms and such that the at least one meaningful term is associated with a plurality of grammatical relationships.