Patent Document ID: 8799776
Application ID: 11686660

Base Claim:
1. A processor-implemented method for automatically recognizing Whole-Part relations in a natural language document, the method comprising: providing a database having a plurality of stored generic Whole-Part relationship patterns as models for determining Whole-Part relations of the outside world in external natural language documents, wherein each generic Whole-Part relationship pattern identifies: a sense of one or more components of an expanded Subject-Action-Object (eSAO) and whether or not other components of the eSAO are non-empty; and which components of the eSAO act as a Whole eSAO and which components act as a Part eSAO in a Whole-Part relation; providing text from the natural language document; recognizing one or more eSAO sets in the text, wherein each eSAO set has one or more eSAO components; matching the one or more eSAO sets against the generic Whole-Part relationship patterns stored in the database, including determining if the eSAO component sense and non-empty requirements of a generic Whole-Part relationship pattern are satisfied by an eSAO set and, if the eSAO component sense and non-empty requirements of a generic Whole-Part relationship pattern are satisfied by an eSAO set, determining which eSAO component of the eSAO set is a Whole eSAO and which is a Part eSAO; and generating one or more eSAO Whole-Part relations based on the matching, wherein the eSAO Whole-Part relation comprises a Whole eSAO and an Part eSAO.

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Claim 8:
8. The method according to claim 1 , wherein: matching the one or more eSAO sets against generic Whole-Part relationship patterns comprises matching a pair of eSAO sets; and generating one or more eSAO Whole-Part relations based on the matching comprises generating a single eSAO Whole-Part relation based on matching the pair of eSAO sets.