ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,354,021, issued on July 8, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Contextual-based knowledge entity suggestions" was invented by Sebastian Johannes Blohm (Munich), Xiao Li (Stamford, Conn.), Nikita Voronkov (Bothell, Wash.), Hadi Kotaich (Bellevue, Wash.), Wenjin Xu (Bothell, Wash.), Kun Piao (Sammamish, Wash.) and Dion Stephan Javellana Ong (New Haven, Conn.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A data processing system implements receiving a textual context inserted into a user interface element; receiving an indicator inserted into the user interface element after the textual context, the indicator indicating a ...