Overlapping subdocuments in a vector space search process
AssigneeClaritech Corporation
InventorDavid A. Evans
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The present invention is a method and apparatus for retrieving information from a database. Initially, the documents within the database are divided into mutually exclusive subdocuments that generally correspond to paragraphs of text. The present invention further creates a second set of subdocuments that overlap adjacent paragraphs of text. In particular, the location of the overlapping subdocuments depends on the size of the initial paragraphs. This second set of overlapping subdocuments are scored just as the mutually exclusive subdocuments are scored. The scores from both the mutually exclusive and overlapping subdocuments are used in ranking the relevance of documents to a query. The use of both sets of subdocument scores improves the effectiveness of the scoring algorithm.
Claims15
A method for displaying documents from a database, comprising:
- generating a plurality of paragraph subdocuments for a plurality of documents in a database;
- generating a plurality of overlapping subdocuments from adjacent paragraphs for a plurality of documents n the database;
- generating a score for each of the paragraph subdocuments and overlapping subdocuments wherein said score relates a subdocument to a query of said database;
- sorting the subdocuments into a rank order based on said score;
- and
- displaying text from a document from which said highest ranked subdocument originates.
A computer readable medium bearing sequences of instructions for searching a database, said sequences of instructions comprising:
- generating a plurality of paragraph subdocuments for a plurality of documents in a database;
- generating a plurality of overlapping subdocuments for a plurality of documents in the database;
- generating a score for each of the paragraph and overlapping subdocuments wherein said score relates a subdocument to a query of said database;
- sorting the subdocuments into a rank order based on said score;
- and
- displaying text from a document from which said highest ranked subdocument originates.
A method of ranking documents from a database, comprising the steps of:
- retrieving a database having at least one document from memory;
- generating at least two overlapping paragraph subdocuments from each document;
- inputting a query;
- calculating a score for each subdocument wherein each score relates said subdocument to said query;
- and
- ranking the subdocuments based on the score.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.