Patent ID: 7769579

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of learning facts, comprising: at a computer system including one or more processors and memory storing one or more programs, the one or more processors executing the one or more programs to perform the operations of: accessing an object within a fact repository, wherein the object includes a name and one or more seed facts; identifying a set of documents having content and associated with the object name, each document in the set having at least a first predefined number of distinct seed facts in common with the seed facts of the object; for each of the documents in the identified set: identifying in the document a contextual pattern associated with the respective seed facts in the document; confirming that the document includes at least a second predefined number of instances of content matching the contextual pattern in addition to the respective seed facts; and only when the confirming is successful, extracting an extracted fact from a respective instance of content matching the contextual pattern and merging the extracted fact into the object; wherein the first predefined number is greater than one and the second predefined number is greater than one.