Navigation in a hierarchical structured transaction processing system

A method performed in connection with an arrangement of nodes representable as a hierarchical graph containing vertices and edges connecting at least two of the vertices, the method comprising:

• receiving an input from a user as a response to a verbal description associated with a first vertex;
• analyzing the input to identify a meaningful term that can be associated with at least one keyword;
• selecting a vertex in the graph structure that is not connected by an edge to the first vertex, based upon an association between the meaningful term and the at least one keyword and a correlation between the at least one keyword and the vertex;
• and
• jumping to the vertex.

A method performed in connection with an arrangement of nodes representable as a hierarchical graph comprising:

• correlating keywords with nodes in which the keywords appear to create an inverted index so that the keywords each appear only once and all nodes containing each of the keywords are indexed to those keywords;
• maintaining a thesaurus of synonyms for at least some of the keywords;
• receiving an input from a user containing a meaningful word;
• searching the inverted index to determine whether the meaningful word is a keyword and, if the meaningful word is a keyword, jumping to a node identified in the inverted index as correlated to that keyword, otherwise,
• searching the thesaurus to determine if the meaningful word is a synonym for at least one particular keyword and, if the meaningful word is the synonym, using the synonym to identify the at least one particular keyword, and
• jumping to at least one node correlated to the at least one particular keyword.

A system comprising:

• a hierarchically arranged series of nodes;
• an inverted index correlating keywords with the nodes;
• a thesaurus correlating at least some keywords with synonyms for those keywords;
• a processor executable learning procedure configured to, upon receipt of a term that is identified as neither a synonym nor a keyword based upon a search of both the inverted index and the thesaurus,
• (a) identify the term as at last one particular synonym for at least one particular keyword and
• (b) correlate the term with the at least one particular keyword, so that when a subsequent user provides the term the system will operate as if the term was synonymous with the at least one particular keyword.

A method performed by a program executed by a processor to navigate among a hierarchically arranged group of nodes, each of the nodes having an associated verbal description, the method comprising:

• eliminating stop words and duplicates from the verbal descriptions to create a list of keywords;
• creating a list of thesaurus words;
• creating a first matrix comprising a correlation of at least some thesaurus words with at least some keywords;
• creating a second matrix by calculating cosine values from a co-occurrence analysis of the entries in the first matrix;
• determining a synonymy among the at least some thesaurus words and the at least some keywords;
• and
• creating a thesaurus configured as an inverted index based upon the synonomy.