US Patent 7269547 Tokenizer for a natural language processing system

The present invention is a segmenter used in a natural language processing system. The segmenter segments a textual input string into tokens for further natural language processing. In accordance with one feature of the invention, the segmenter includes a tokeinzer engine that proposes segmentations and submits them to a linguistic knowledge component for validation. In accordance with another feature of the invention, the segmentation system includes language specific data that contains a precedence hierarchy for punctuation. If proposed tokens in the input string contain punctuation, they can illustratively be broken into subtokens based on the precedence hierarchy.