Patent ID: 7565368

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving text with a computer system comprising a computer-readable medium configured with a functional presences engine, the functional presence engine configured as a probabilistic parser; performing with the computer system, lexical analysis on the text effective to tokenize text portions to produce tokenized content in a format specified in one or more interpreted lexical files specifying one or more matching rules and corresponding output symbols; and With a computer system configured with a knowledge base component operably associated with the functional presence engine, defining: cases of text matchable to text received by the functional presence engine; and responses that are triggered in an event of a match, wherein individual lexical files comprise a macro section that specifies macro values that are substitutable for macro names, and a lex section that specifies lexical rewrite rules, and wherein the lex section comprises a main section that contains rules that are executed at a top level of a tokenization process, and a sub-section associated with a rule in the main section, the sub-section containing a group of rules that get executed only if the associated main section rule produces the best match.