Hybrid Approach to Handling Hypotheticals in Texts

摘要

Mechanisms are provided for processing natural language content. The mechanisms receive natural language content and analyze the natural language content to generate a parse tree data structure. The mechanisms process the parse tree data structure to identify one or more instances of hypothetical spans in the natural language content. The hypothetical spans are terms or phrases indicative of a hypothetical statement. The mechanisms perform an operation based on the natural language content. The operation is performed with portions of the natural language content corresponding to the one or more identified instances of hypothetical spans being given different relative weights within portions of the natural language content than other portions of the natural language content.