Patent Document ID: 5418716
Application ID: 07557833

Base Claim:
1. A natural language processing system for recognizing sentence patterns (VPs) and grammatical cases comprising: means for providing a slot table which contains all VPs available to a predicate in an input sentence arranged in plural rows, and which contains arguments of the VPs expressed as slot conditions in slots positioned in a finite number of positions; a grammatical case pattern table which contains columns corresponding to grammatical cases that are arranged in the objective word-order found among grammatical cases in declarative sentences, and which contains all grammatical case patterns expressed as binary representations of existing/non-existing ones of grammatical cases in the rows corresponding to the grammatical case patterns; means for converting position information for arguments of a VP to grammatical cases on the grammatical case pattern table, which includes means for adding up numerical values, representing existing/non-existing ones of grammatical cases for the grammatical case patterns corresponding to VPs, until the sum of the numerical values adds up to the number of the position information in a basic pattern, and which treats as grammatical cases of the arguments of the VP only those grammatical cases corresponding to columns that correspond to the last number among the numerical values that have been added up; and means for processing a plurality of VPs in parallel, which includes means for comparing features of a candidate for arguments of VPs in the input sentence with corresponding slot conditions of the slots which belong to a selected position on the slot table through all available VPs, which recognizes as matched VPs only VPs that have a slot where each of all compared slot conditions shares the same value with the corresponding feature of the candidate, and which recognizes as matched grammatical cases only grammatical cases that have been described in the slots of the matched VPs.

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Claim 3:
3. A natural language processing system for recognizing sentence patterns (VPs) and grammatical cases as claimed in claim 1, wherein the positions on the slot table are set by case markers.