NATURAL LANGUAGE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

A natural language information retrieval (NLIR) system employing a hash table technique to reduce memory requirements and a proxy process module to improve processing speed on multi-processor platforms. The NLIR system includes a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) search engine annex that implements a number of improvements that allow the preexisting natural language processing (NLP) core code module to operate sufficiently fast in a limited-memory environment. The improvements relate to (1) reducing storage requirements, (2) increasing processing speed, (3) improved operation on multi-processor platforms, and (4) a trouble-shooting mechanism. The NLIR system includes three modes of operation. First, during index processing, the NLIR system prepares documents for NLP searching to create a group of searchable documents. Second, during question processing, the NLIR system receives a natural language question and, for each document in the group of searchable documents, computes a document score connoting the likelihood that the document includes an answer to the natural language question. Third, during debugging, the NLIR system receives trouble-shooting requests and returns diagnostic reports, such as a document trace report and a question trace report.