4. A system for extracting information from a natural-language text, said system comprising: an input unit for receiving said natural-language text; a lexicon file in which less than 1000 tool words with predefined grammatical functions are recorded, said tool words being essentially constituted by articles, prepositions, conjunctions and verbal auxiliaries; an analysis processor connected to said input unit, and to the lexicon file, and organized to act in a first stage to encode the words of the natural-language text by evaluating the grammatical function of each word by comparing each word with the contents of said lexicon file of tool words, so as to identify the tool words in the text and so as to evaluate the functions of the other words which are not recognized as being tool words, by comparing their locations relative to the locations of the words recognized as being tool words, and, in a second stage, to search subsets of the resulting succession of encoded words to look for groups of encoded words that comply with predefined syntactical rules, so as to identify nominal groups; and an output unit connected to said analysis processor for receiving the groups of encoded words recognized as being syntactical patterns.
9. A system according to claim 4 , wherein the analysis processor further comprises means for recognizing the language of the text received at the input unit.