Patent Document ID: 8370328
Application ID: 13206492

Base Claim:
1. A method for creating an electronic database of disambiguated entity mentions from a corpus of electronic documents using a microprocessor, the method comprising: (a) executing on the microprocessor a data harvesting module to automatically extract entity mentions from the electronic documents in the corpus and parse the entity mentions into mention objects; (b) executing on the microprocessor a mention group creation module to create one or more mention groups by automatically grouping the mention objects together according to a distinguishing attribute common to a given class of mention objects; (c) selecting a mention group from the one or more mention groups for comparison processing; (d) executing on the microprocessor a collection of comparison modules that automatically (i) compares every mention object in the selected mention group with every other mention object in the selected mention group to produce a collection of comparison algorithm scores for every pair of mention objects in the selected mention group, and (ii) generates an overall confidence score for every pair of mention objects in the selected mention group based on the collection of comparison algorithm scores for said every pair of mention objects; (e) executing on the microprocessor an entity object creation module to create one or more new entity objects for the selected mention group by automatically (i) grouping together mention objects with other mention objects, based on the confidence scores of each pair of mention objects and a specified confidence threshold, wherein pairs of mention objects having a confidence score greater than or equal to the specified threshold are assigned to the same new entity object, and (ii) merging previously-created entity objects with other previously-created entity objects, based on the confidence scores of each pair of entity objects, and a specified confidence threshold, wherein pairs of entity objects having a confidence score greater than or equal to the specified threshold are assigned to the same new entity object; (f) storing said one or more new entity objects in the electronic database of disambiguated entity mentions; and (g) repeating steps (c) through (f) above until all of the one or more mention groups have been comparison processed.

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Claim 14:
14. The method of claim 1 , wherein: the entity mentions in the corpus of electronic documents are not arranged according to a predefined document structure; and the data harvesting module comprises a natural language processor that, when executed by the microprocessor, causes the microprocessor to extract and parse the entity mentions in the electronic documents in accordance with a set of natural language rules.