Patent ID: 7574348

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of correcting collocation errors in a document, comprising: accessing a sentence of text in the document, using a processor; detecting one of a plurality of different checking word types in the sentence of text, the detected checking word type being indicative of a particular collocation error type; identified the particular collocation error type based on the detected checking word type; accessing, in a memory, a set of query generation rules to select a set of rules, from a plurality of different sets of rules, for query generation based on the identified particular collocation error type indicated by the checking word type detected; generating a particular set of queries for the accessed sentence, using the selected set of query generation rules, the particular set of queries including a plurality of queries based on the sentence, each of the plurality of queries including a different set of text extracted from the sentence of text in the document wherein generating a set of queries comprises generating a query template that includes words from the extracted text with a placeholder for the word corresponding to the checking word type, and wherein generating the plurality of queries includes, a sentence query including the sentence without the identified word, a chunk query including a chunk of the sentence without the identified word, and a word query including a pair of words in the sentence without the identified word; submitting the plurality of queries to a search module that searches a collection of documents to obtain results; receiving the results from the search module that include text corresponding to text in the plurality of queries wherein the placeholder in the query template is matched by any word; comparing, in order, beginning with a first of the plurality of queries to a last of the plurality of queries, the text in the queries to the text in the results, only until a match occurs between the text in a query being compared and the text in the results; if the last of the plurality of queries is compared, without a match occurring, then detecting a collocation error based on the comparison of the text in the queries to the text in the results by identifying portions of the text in the queries that do not match word-for-word, with the text in the results; and providing an indication of the detected collocation error in the sentence of text and possible corrections for the detected collocation error.