Patent 6876990 was granted and assigned to NEC on April, 2005 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An object of the present invention is to analyze questionnaire replies automatically from questionnaire reply statements including free reply description in natural language collected through a network, by using a text classification engine, and to issue the analysis results of the claimant as the knowledge in the rule formats. Questionnaire respondents send questionnaire reply statements from respondent computers. Questionnaire reply statements are accumulated in a database through a network. A text classification engine reads out accumulated questionnaire reply statements from the database, and learns the rules for classifying the questionnaire reply statements, and issues them to the claimant.