Patent ID: 7761437

Claim:
A named entity extracting apparatus that extracts a named entity from one or more input texts by sequentially using one or more named entity patterns each indicating a judgment criterion of a named entity portion included in a text, said named entity extracting apparatus comprising: a processor; an information database which stores a plurality of texts; a text acquisition unit configured to acquire the plurality of texts from said information database; a named entity pattern storage unit which stores the named entity patterns; an extraction order storage unit which stores a plurality of rule sets each representing an association between the one or more named entity patterns and extraction order numbers indicating an order in which the one or more named entity patterns are used for extracting named entities, the one or more named entity patterns being stored by said named entity pattern storage unit; a named entity extracting unit configured, for each of the rule sets, to extract one or more portions from the plurality of texts as the named entities in the order indicated by the extraction order numbers each corresponding to the named entity patterns included in each of the rule sets, and to determine the extracted named entities as a named entity set, the one or more portions satisfying a judgment criterion indicated by each of the named entity patterns, the plurality of texts being acquired by said text acquisition unit, and the rule sets being stored by said extraction order storage unit; and a named entity determination unit configured to count, using the processor, for each of the named entity sets, the number of similar named entities out of named entities included in each of the named entity sets, and to output a named entity set having the smallest number of the similar named entities, the named entity sets being obtained by said named entity extracting unit, and the similar named entities including a predetermined number or more of identical characters.