Patent ID: 7689410

Claim:
A lexical semantic system for modeling and interpreting semantics of a natural language input on a computer comprising: a set of lexical semantic categories selected to model content of the natural language input, the set of lexical semantic categories is stored at a processor readable storage medium of a computing system, the set of lexical semantic categories including a syntactic category, a semantic role that identifies a function of a particular syntactic category within a particular natural language utterance, a mapping between the syntactic category and the semantic role, and the syntactic categories defining structural elements of a sentence, the set of lexical semantic categories further including types of speech including noun, modifier, and verb classes, each semantic role representing an argument or modifier across a range of the noun, and verb classes; and a processor, being a functional component of the system, accessing the set of lexical semantic categories and activated by the natural language input to perform a method for associating content of the natural language input to one or more categories of the set of lexical semantic categories, the method comprising: executing, with the processor, a set of rules to apply a collection of procedures to the natural language input to associate content of the natural language input to the set of lexical semantic categories including identifying semantic roles in the natural language input that are mapped in the set of lexical semantic categories to syntactic categories in the natural language input to produce mapped elements; providing the mapped elements to a natural language analysis engine, implemented by the processor, the natural language analysis engine performing two-way association associating the mapped elements to a linguistic object model and associating the linguistic object model to the mapped elements to obtain a semantic model object representing the natural language input; and outputting the semantic model object for instantiation as an interpretation of the natural language input.