Ranking Textual Candidates of controlled natural languages

摘要

Disclosed is a method of ranking textual candidates of controlled natural languages, the textual candidates forming portions of a first context, a plurality of contexts being arranged in a hierarchy. The method comprises the steps of assigning a probability to text fragments forming the textual candidates in the first context in which it is desired to rank the textual candidate; assigning a probability to text fragments forming the textual candidates in contexts in the hierarchy other than the first context; calculating, for each of the textual candidates, a weighted sum of the assigned probability in the first context and the assigned probabilities in contexts in the hierarchy other than the first context, wherein the weighting applied to each of the assigned probabilities is inversely related to the hierarchical distance between the first context and contexts in the hierarchy other than the first context. The contexts may be paragraphs within the hierarchy of a document. A probability may be assigned according to how frequently a text fragment has been used within a context and/or how recently a text fragment has been used within a context.