A system and methods and data structure for quantitatively assessing associations between terms or symbols in natural language and non-natural language contents. Some of the terms represent objects or concepts or semantic attributes; some other terms represent properties associated with the objects or concepts or attributes. The methods include obtaining a first group of text contents, specifying a target term or symbol, and identifying contextual attributes of the target term or symbol. The contextual attributes include grammatical and semantic attributes as well as positional and distance attributes. Association strength values are calculated for related terms or symbols based on the contextual attributes of the target term or symbol, and terms or symbols are selected to represent the properties of an object or concept or attribute.
System, methods, and data structure for quantitative assessment of symbolic associations