Patent ID: 7949667

Claim:
An information processing apparatus for processing television content comprising: an acquisition section to acquire meta-data of the content; and a central processing unit, comprising a processor and memory, programmed to function as: a morphological analyzing section to perform a morphological analysis on text information included in the meta-data of the content; a layout recognition and extraction section to recognize a layout for each described content from a morphological analysis result obtained from the morphological analyzing section, to recognize a location within the layout of a performer field having a performer name or performer names therein, and to read inside information from inside the performer field and outside information from outside the performer field; an inside performer-field determination section to receive the inside information without the outside information and to extract a respective inside performer name or names therefrom; wherein the inside performer-field determination section includes a similarity-distance calculation section to calculate a similarity distance between information of the inside information and a number of list patterns of predetermined performer names, and an extraction section to extract the respective outside performer name therefrom which has a smallest similarity distance; an outside performer-field determination section to receive the outside information without the inside information and to extract a respective outside performer name or names therefrom, such that the outside performer-field determination section is operable to extract the respective outside performer name or names from a portion of the layout other than the performer field wherein the outside performer-field determination section includes a comparison section to compare information of the outside information with a number of list patterns of predetermined performer names; and a performer-name extraction result storage section to store the extracted performer names.