Methods and apparatus for performing an affinity based similarity search
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsCharu C. Aggarwal, Philip Shi-Lung Yu
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Methodologies are provided which use affinity lists in order to perform query retrieval more effectively and efficiently. The invention comprises a two phase method. In the first phase, we find a threshold number k of candidate documents which are retrieved by the method. In the second phase, we calculate the affinity value to each of these k documents and report them in ranked order of affinities. The first phase of finding the k most valuable candidates is accomplished using an iterative technique on the affinity lists. Once these candidates have been found, the affinity to each document in the set is obtained, and the resulting documents are rank ordered by affinity to the target document.
Claims42
A method of performing an affinity based similarity search, the method comprising the steps of:
- generating an affinity list for each term in a lexicon of terms of documents to be used in the similarity search;
- generating an inverted list of document identifiers for each term in the lexicon;
- and
- evaluating a search query using the affinity lists and inverted lists.
Apparatus for performing an affinity based similarity search, the apparatus comprising:
- at least one processor operative to:
- (i) generate an affinity list for each term in a lexicon of terms of documents to be used in the similarity search;
- (ii) generate an inverted list of document identifiers for each term in the lexicon;
- and (iii) evaluate a search query using the affinity lists and inverted lists;
- and
- memory, coupled to the at least one processor, for storing at least one of the affinity lists and the inverted lists.
An article of manufacture for performing an affinity based similarity search, comprising a machine readable medium containing one or more programs which when executed implement the steps of:
- generating an affinity list for each term in a lexicon of terms of documents to be used in the similarity search;
- generating an inverted list of document identifiers for each term in the lexicon;
- and
- evaluating a search query using the affinity lists and inverted lists.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.