Patent Document ID: 8812301
Application ID: 13245147

Base Claim:
1. A method for processing queries, comprising: providing access to a lexicon in which a set of text elements that each start with a lowercase letter are each recognized in the lexicon as being a proper noun when in a capitalized form, each of text elements in the set of text elements starting with a lowercase letter being linked in the lexicon to a respective capitalized form; receiving a natural language query to be processed, the query comprising a sequence of text elements, the text elements comprising words; with a computer processor, processing the query comprising: assigning part of speech (POS) features from a list of POS features to the text elements in the query, including: for a text element in the query which starts with a lowercase letter and which is among the set of text elements in the lexicon that are recognized as being a proper noun when in a capitalized form, assigning recapitalization information to the query text element, the recapitalization information comprising a part of speech feature of the capitalized form; disambiguating part of speech features for the text elements in the query including applying rules for recapitalizing text elements based on the recapitalization information; and chunking the disambiguated query; and outputting the processed query.

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Claim 12:
12. The method of claim 1 , wherein the query natural language is French and the part of speech disambiguation includes applying at least one contextual rule selected from: a. a rule which in the case of ambiguity between a verb and a noun for the first word of the query, selects the noun as the part of speech for the first word; b. a rule which in the case of ambiguity between a verb and a noun for a word of the query other than a first word of the query, selects the noun as the part of speech for the word if there is no person agreement with one of the previous nouns in the query; and c. a rule which in the case of ambiguity between a verb and a noun for a word of the query, wherein the verb is neither in the past participle form nor the infinitive form, selects the noun as the part of speech for the word if it is not followed by a determiner.