Patent Document ID: 9400779
Application ID: 13911534

Base Claim:
1. A method for classifying comments on an idea submission, comprising: receiving a collection of textual comments from users, each of the comments in the collection comprising text in a natural language and annotating an idea submission, previously-submitted by another user, which includes a description of an idea; for each of a plurality of comment classes, providing at least one pattern for assigning a textual comment to the class based on the occurrence of a specified syntactic relation in the comment, the comment classes including: a first class for reaction to the content of the idea, a second class for expression of a commenter's judgment of an idea's value, and a third class for reaction to an idea generation process in which the associated idea submission is made, the at least one pattern for the third class comprising a pattern which identifies when a term in the comment which is in a set of terms designated as being associated with a domain-specific PROCESS concept is present in a comment sentence; natural language processing each of the comments to identify dependencies in at least a part of the comment; based on the identified dependencies, automatically classifying the comments according to the plurality of comment classes, the classifying including applying the at least one pattern for identifying comments that are assigned to the third comment class; wherein when the comment is assigned to the first class, the method further includes proposing appending at least a part of the comment to the description of the associated idea submission; wherein when the comment is assigned to the second class, the method further includes providing for rating the idea submission; and outputting information based on the assigned comment classes, wherein the natural language processing, classifying, and outputting are performed with a computer processor.

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Claim 4:
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the classifying includes applying patterns for identifying comments that are assigned to the first comment class, the patterns comprising at least two of: a prior art pattern for detecting existing ideas which detects when a term in the comment is the subject of the verb “exist” and in which the term is in a set of terms designated as relating to an IDEA concept or is in a set of terms designated as relating to an ORGANIZATION concept; a prior art pattern for detecting similar ideas which detects when a term in the comment which is in a set of terms designated as relating to a SIMILAR concept is in a syntactic relationship with a term which is in the set of terms designated as relating to the IDEA concept; an additional information pattern for detecting comparison of ideas which detects when a term in the comment which is in the set of terms designated as relating to the IDEA concept is a subject complement of a comparative adjective; an additional information pattern for detecting conditional expressions, which detects when the comment includes a conditional auxiliary verb; an additional information pattern for detecting a need of an idea or organization, which detects when a term in the comment which is in the set of terms designated as relating to the SIMILAR concept or to the ORGANIZATION concept is in a syntactic relationship with a term which is in the set of terms designated as relating to a LACK concept; an additional information pattern which detects when the comment is in a form of a question; an additional information pattern which detects when the comment is in an imperative form; and an additional information pattern for detecting personal suggestions which detects when a first person pronoun is in a syntactic relationship with a term in the comment which is in the set of terms designated as relating to a SUGGESTION concept.