Patent ID: 7865356

Claim:
A method of proper name recognition for interpretation of lexical user input and by a system configured to respond to the lexical user input, the method comprising: classifying each word of a word string containing a plurality of words with a tag indicating one of a proper named entity category and a non-named entity category, wherein consecutive words that are tagged as belonging to the same proper named entity category are grouped to form partial proper names; and correcting the tag of a word of the word string; wherein the correcting includes: forming a pool of candidate full names selected from a full name database by selecting those full names that best match a given partial proper name, each of at least a subset of the candidate full names including a respective group of words; changing the tag of a boundary word of the given partial proper name to indicate a non-named entity category if the boundary word does not exist in the pool of candidate full names; examining a neighboring word of the given partial proper name; and assigning the neighboring word of the given partial proper name to the named entity category if the neighboring word occurs in the candidate full name with the same ordering.