A METHOD AND DEVICE FOR IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF PATTERN RECOGNITION IN NATURAL LANGUAGE

A method for recognizing patterns in natural language using a data processing device, the method comprising defining (101) a plurality of tokens, each token defining a group of words or a specific word instance, defining (102) a plurality of moderators, each moderator defining a number of times a specific token is to occur, defining (103) a qualifier, associating (104) the qualifier with a token of the plurality of tokens, the qualifier defining a criterion or property for a word of the group of words or of the specific word instance of the token, defining (105) a pattern, the pattern comprising at least the token associated with the qualifier and a moderator, and the pattern defining a sequence of natural language words, comparing (107) the pattern and a natural text string input to determine whether the input matches the pattern, wherein the step of comparing comprises determining (1071) whether a match with the token associated with the qualifier is found in the input, if such a match is found in the input, testing (1072) whether the match found matches the criterion or property defined by the qualifier, and determining (1073) that the input matches the pattern only if the match found matches the criterion or property defined by the qualifier.