Invalidity dossier
US 5995922
Identifying information related to an input word in an electronic dictionary
Current assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC
Added 9/23/2026, 6:49:02 PM
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Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview: US 5,995,922
Title: Identifying information related to an input word in an electronic dictionary
Patent number: US5995922A
Assignee/Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (original assignee: Microsoft Corp)
Inventors: Joseph E. Penteroudakis, Steve Richardson
Key dates: Priority/filing date 1996-05-02; publication/grant date 1999-11-30; anticipated expiration 2016-05-02. Legal status: Expired – Lifetime (as listed; the source notes this is an assumption, not a legal conclusion).
Purpose: According to the supplied excerpt, the invention relates to natural language processing (NLP), specifically to a method and system for organizing and retrieving information from an electronic dictionary. It addresses morphological analysis—identifying input words and supplying dictionary-type information such as syntactic roles and related/inflected word forms. The excerpt illustrates this with dictionary entries for "the" and "person," showing key/attribute/value pairs including attributes like "Adj," "Lemma," and "Bits" with morphological and syntactic abbreviations, plus "Senses" records holding definitions and examples.
Plain-language scope: The patent describes retrieving dictionary information for words in input text during NLP. Words and punctuation are recognized as tokens, and attribute/value records are built from dictionary information. These records feed a syntactic subsystem that creates parse-tree nodes and applies syntax rules to build higher-level nodes up to a complete sentence parse. The excerpt's discussion of morphological, syntactic, and semantic subsystems (FIG. 1) and syntax parse trees frames the context; the enumerated claims are not present in the supplied excerpt.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5995922/en
What the excerpt does not establish: The excerpt omits the actual claims, detailed description, and figures (beyond references to FIGS. 1–5). It does not establish the precise claimed scope, claim limitations, embodiments, or the full data structures. It also omits any prosecution history, prior art, and the basis for the listed expiration/legal status.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:42:34 PM
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Assignment history
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Prior art
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