ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN ANNOTATION CONFIDENCE LEVELS FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

An approach for determining a combination of terms that represents subject matter of a natural language sentence is provided. Numbers of words from a beginning of the sentence to terms in the sentence that match terms in the combination of terms are determined. The sentence is divided into natural language phrases including a complex phrase and first and second simple phrases extracted from the complex phrase. Based in part on (a) the numbers of words from the beginning of the sentence to the terms in the sentence that match terms in the combination of terms, (b) whether all terms of the combination are contained in the first and/or second simple phrases, and (c) whether all terms of the combination are contained in the complex phrase but not contained in the first and/or second simple phrases, how well the combination of terms represents the subject matter is determined.