Method of and apparatus for generating a list of terms and a theasarus

摘要

A list of terms ranked in accordance with their relatedness to an input term is generated as follows: A list of terms related, for example by meaning, and given scores indicating their strength of relatedness is retrieved by accessing a first resource with the input term. At least one further list of scored terms is retrieved by accessing at least one further resource with the input term. One or more lists of unscored terms may be retrieved by accessing other resources with the input term. Terms which are unscored are given arbitrary scores. Each returned list is merged into a single output list and each term in the single list is then assigned a score, for example based on the weighted average of all the scores for the term. Certain terms maybe filtered from the output list. A thesaurus may be generated by processing many terms in this manner.