Patent Document ID: 20100138216
Application ID: 12595936
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for forming entailment relations; comprising a) providing at least one input pattern (p) with N pattern slots (N>1), said input pattern (p) expressing a specific semantic relation between N entities that fill the N pattern slots of the input pattern (p) as slot fillers, b) providing at least one cluster (c) of articles, said articles of said cluster (c) relating to a common main topic; c) processing said articles with respect to the input pattern (p) and identifying the identities which match the semantic type of the N pattern slots; d) if said at least one input pattern matches a portion of an article (a) of said at least one cluster (c): i) storing the N slot fillers (s 1 , s 2 ,. .. , s N ), which match the slots of the pattern (p), and a cluster identifier I c of the cluster (c) into a first table S, wherein the N-tuple (s 1 , s 2 ,. .. , s N ) and the cluster identifier I c of the associated cluster (c) form one element of table S; ii) for each element of table S, identifying appearances of the slot fillers (s 1 , s 2 ,. .. , s N ) in a plurality of articles of cluster (c) and for each appearance so identified, storing the slot fillers (s 1 , s 2 ,. .. , s N ) together with the sentence in which they occur into a second table C 0 ; iii) from the sentences stored in table C 0 , extracting patterns which span over the corresponding N slot fillers (s 1 , s 2 ,. .. , s N ), said extracted pattern expressing a semantic relation between said N slot fillers; and iv) forming an entailment relation between said extracted patterns and said input pattern.