Patent ID: 8380489

Claim:
A method for quantitatively assessing associations between different terms in a natural language, comprising: obtaining, by a computer system, a first group of sentences, at least some of which comprise an object name; parsing each of the first group of sentences to identify a subject and a predicate by the computer system; assigning a sentence type to each of the first group of sentences according to the location of the object name in the sentence; tokenizing each of the first group of sentences to produce a plurality of tokens that includes a jth token; for each sentence in the first group of sentences that includes the jth token, adding a weighting coefficient to a parameter token_j_count, wherein the weighting coefficient is dependent on the sentence type of the corresponding sentence, wherein token_j_count represents the likelihood of the jth token to be a property name associated with the object name; and dividing a cumulative value of the parameter token_j_count obtained from the first group of sentences by the total number of sentences in the first group to produce an internal association strength (IAS) for the jth token, wherein one or more property names are to be selected from the plurality of tokens using their respective internal association strengths.