Patent ID: 8244730

Claim:
A computer-based method for extracting relationships from textual data, comprising the steps of: receiving, from a first distributed data source, training data comprising three or more words describing relationships between an action and an object; collecting textual data including the received training data from the first distributed data source; generating a dependency tree describing relationships between words of the textual data from a syntactic pattern extracted from the collected textual data; inserting satellite links and word order data into the dependency tree, the satellite links identifying links within the text data in addition to a basic lexical path and the word order data describing the order of words in the syntactic pattern; obtaining additional text data by scanning a second distributed data source, wherein the additional text data is not used in generating the dependency tree; extracting target causal relationships between one or more actions and one or more objects in the additional text data obtained from the second distributed data source by comparing the additional text data to the dependency tree and using the word order data; determining the validity of the target relationships; training a classifier to automatically determine the validity of target relationships in addition to the target relationships previously determined to be valid based at least in part on the target relationships previously determined to be valid; and storing the target relationships determined to be valid in a computer storage media.