1. A method in a computer system for classifying sentences, the method comprising: providing training sentences and their classifications; generating feature representations of the sentences; training a sentence classifier to classify sentences based on the generated feature representations and the classifications of the sentences they represent; receiving a sentence; generating a feature representation of the sentence; and applying the trained sentence classifier to the generated feature representation of the sentence to classify the sentence; wherein the feature representations include a pattern feature, and wherein the pattern feature is based on support of a generalized sentence of a sentence to be a generalized sentence pattern of sentences within training data.