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 11:
11. The method of claim 1 , wherein the query natural language is English 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 a 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 second word of the query, selects the noun as the part of speech for the second word if the query starts with an adjective or a noun; c. a rule which in the case of ambiguity between a verb and a noun for a word of the query, selects the noun as the part of speech for the word if the word is followed by a coordinating conjunction and a noun or if it is preceded by a noun and a coordinating conjunction; and d. a rule which in the case of ambiguity between an adjective and a past participle verb, selects the adjective as the part of speech if the word is followed by a noun.