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An ontology-based parser incorporates both a system and method for converting natural-language text into predicate-argument format that can be easily used by a variety of applications, including search engines, summarization applications, categorization applications, and word processors. The ontology-based parser contains functional components for receiving documents in a plurality of formats, tokenizing them into instances of concepts from an ontology, and assembling the resulting concepts into predicates. The ontological parser has two major functional elements, a sentence lexer and a parser. The sentence lexer takes a sentence and converts it into a sequence of ontological entities that are tagged with part-of-speech information. The parser converts the sequence of ontological entities into predicate structures using a two-stage process that analyzes the grammatical structure of the sentence, and then applies rules to it that bind arguments into predicates.The present invention relates to an ontological parser for natural language processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for ontological parsing of natural language that provides a simple knowledge-base-style representation format for the manipulation of natural-language documents. The system utilizes unstructured text as input and produces a set of data structures representing the conceptual content of the document as output. The data is transformed using a syntactic parser and ontology. The ontology is used as a lexical resource. The output that results is also an ontological entity with a structure that matches the organization of concepts in natural language. The resulting ontological entities are predicate-argument structures designed in accordance with the best practices of artificial intelligence and knowledge-base research.