Context Based Surface Form Generation for Cognitive System Dictionaries

A mechanism is provided in a data processing system to implement an annotator for annotating content using context-based surface forms. The mechanism receives a dictionary data structure of surface forms comprising a plurality of regular expressions and input content. The mechanism compares a given span of text in the input content to each regular expression in the dictionary data structure. Responsive to the given span of text matching a given regular expression, an annotator annotates the span of text with a content indicator corresponding to a content category associated with the dictionary data structure. The mechanism performs a natural language processing operation on the input content based on results of the annotation.