Patent ID: 7197697

Claim:
A reference reason identifying apparatus, comprising: a reference feature/reference reasons correspondence table indicating correspondence between contexts of character strings and reference reasons; a referred document extracting device extracting document information about a referred document from given document data; a reference position extracting device extracting information about a position where the referred document is cited in the document data, and a character string in the neighborhood of the position; an identification device obtaining a context of an extracted character string by performing language analysis of the extracted character string, and identifying a reason indicating why the referred document is cited by retrieving the reason from the reference feature/reference reason correspondence table using the context of the extracted character string as a reference feature, the reason including at least one of answer, application, basic, contraposition, human, related work, review, software, technique, weak correlation and similar; and an output device outputting output information including the information extracted by the referred document extracting device and the reason why the referred document is cited.