METHOD FOR STORING AND APPLYING RELATED SETS OF PATTERN/MESSAGE RULES

摘要

This invention provides a method and apparatus for efficiently storing and applying related sets of pattern/message rules that are used to analyse and annotate blocks of text. Where sets of rules can include other sets, representations of the sets that speed analysis can contain significant redundancy and add to the consumption of memory. In a one aspect of the invention, all rules are represented in a single pattern-matching data structure (which is applied to a block of text to find all matches by all rules) and the rulesets are represented using boolean vectors (one of which is used to filter the matches) which are compressed by identifying common subspans. In a further aspect of the invention, each ruleset is represented by its own pattern-matching data structure, and these are compressed by identifying common parts. In each aspect, the effect is to allow the creation of a data structure that can speed up matching without consuming excessive memory.

主权项

1. A method for generating annotations for a block of text T using a ruleset S, the method comprising the steps of:
(a) storing a plurality of rulesets containing a plurality of rules created by a plurality of entities, each-rule comprising a text pattern and a message; (b) representing a plurality of rulesets in a data structure D that allows any ruleset R to be applied to a block of text to generate annotations such that the operation has a time complexity less than O(RT); and (c) using D to apply a particular ruleset S to T to generate annotations.