Novell, Inc.

Erik C Govaers

Melissa MacPherson

Carolina Rubio De Hita

David Van Akker

Frank M Platteau

Sophie Laviolette

Peter De Bie

Kurt Van Deun

An information retrieval system that represents the content of a language-based database being searched as well as the user's natural language query. In accordance with one aspect of the invention, the information retrieval system includes a non-real-time development system for automatically creating a database index having one or more content-based database keywords of the data base; and a real-time retrieval system that, in response to a user's natural language query, searches the keyword index for one or more content-based query keywords derived from the natural language query. The development system and the retrieval system morphologically, syntactically and linguistically analyze the data base and the natural language query, respectively, to generate the one or more database keywords and query keywords representing the content of the database and the natural language query, respectively. The development system includes a software development system for creating the database index utilizing a pattern dictionary that includes synonyms and skip words and a morphosyntactic dictionary that includes morphological and syntactic information for words in the natural language of the language-based database and the natural language query. In one embodiment, the retrieval system includes a natural language interface system for creating the one or more query keywords utilizing the pattern dictionary and the morphosyntactic dictionary. In one embodiment, the retrieval system also includes a query-index matcher for matching the one or more query keywords with the one or more database keywords.

Natural language information retrieval system and method

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Malle, Belgium

Erik C Govaers