Patent ID: 8312018

Claim:
A non-transitory computer readable storage medium, comprising executable instructions to: receive a set of entities; process each of the entities in a single pass of the set of entities, the processing for each entity comprising: converting the entity to a standard form including normalized attributes, a tag reference and a feature; expanding the entity with corresponding variants; forming an annotated entity combining the standard form and the corresponding variants; and assigning, using an entity grouper, the entity to (i) an existing group generated when processing a previous entity that matches the annotated entity and (ii) a new group if the annotated entity does not match an existing group; wherein: the entity grouper is implemented with a set of state machines and, at least a portion of the entities are converted into regular expressions that are compiled into finite state networks processed by finite state transducers, each annotated entity comprises: a feature of the corresponding entity in an originally observed form in a corresponding data set, an annotation of the entity in a normalized form having tag delimited components, and at least one variant of the normalized form having tag delimited components.