Patent ID: 8433560

Claim:
A rule based apparatus for modifying annotations in an annotated text base comprising a plurality of documents, the apparatus comprising: an index creator component that: creates an annotation array that indexes annotations assigned to terms in the annotated text base, the annotation array comprising annotations and references for each annotation from the annotated text base; and creates an index that indexes the annotated terms in the annotated text base, the index comprising a list of all words in the annotated text base and for each word, the assigned annotation and a list of references; an annotations modifying component that modifies annotations in response to implementing rules; a retriggering component, responsive to said annotations modifying component modifying a select annotation to an updated annotation, that retriggers a rules engine to: modify all annotation occurrences in the index that match the select annotation, to the updated annotation; and update the annotation array with a reference to the modified occurrences of the select annotation in the annotated text base.