Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.

Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, Inc.

Lycos, Inc.

Andrew R Golding

Emmanuel Roche

Yves Schabes

Michael John Witbrock

Neal B Lesh

Douglas H Beeferman

Doug Herbert Beeferman

Dan Roth

A method including enumerating plausible queries of a target database using query generation rules, and generating associated teasers for each of the enumerated queries using query matching rules.

Returning databases as search results

A method for collecting related queries, comprising the steps of obtaining a first query and a second query that have been submitted during a search for data, and determining whether the first query and the second query have a likelihood of being submitted by a class of searcher.

Method and system for collecting related queries

A measure of the usefulness of an item in a collection of information with respect to a first set of one or more criteria is determined. A first measure of the usefulness of the item with respect to the first set of criteria is determined. A measure of the quality of the item is determined. A second measure of usefulness based on the first measure of usefulness and the measure of quality is determined.

Estimating the usefulness of an item in a collection of information

A wearable device is configured for navigating in an indoor environment. The device includes passive sensors for measuring environmental physical conditions at known locations in the indoor environment and at an unknown locations in the indoor environment. A wearable computer is coupled to passive sensors. The computer is configured to construct a first statistical model of the environment according to the measured physical conditions at the known locations and a second statistical model of the environment according to the measured physical conditions at the unknown locations. Processing means of the computer determines a probability that the unknown locations correspond to the known locations by comparing the second statistical model to the first statistical model.

Indoor navigation with wearable passive sensors

A system is provided which translates phrases from a source language to a target language, and which includes means for continually updating the set of phrases that are known and translatable by the system so as to ensure that the set of phrases accurately reflects the sentences that users most frequently ask to have translated.

Adaptive electronic phrase book

A system is provided for correcting users' mistakes including context-sensitive spelling errors and the like in which an adaptive correction algorithm is utilized which is trained on not only a conventional training corpus, but also on the text which is being corrected, thus to permit the correction of words based on the particular usages of the words in the text being corrected, taking advantage of the fact that the text to be corrected is by and large already mostly correct.

System for text correction adaptive to the text being corrected

A system located in an automobile provides personalized traffic information nd route planning capabilities. This system uses equipment which is becoming standard in automobiles, such as on-board navigation systems and cellular telephones. On-board navigation systems use global positioning system (GPS) satellites to position the automobile with respect to streets in a map database. As the automobile moves, the navigation system updates the location. A central database includes travel time information for each street segment and transition between street segments in the map database. Based upon the travel time information in the database, a route from a current location to a desired destination, or series of destinations, can be planned in order to have a minimum travel time. The route can be provided to the on-board navigation system, which then directs the driver in traveling the route. The cellular telephone in the automobile can be used for communicating with the central database to obtain travel times for route planning. In order to provide dynamic travel time information to the central database, each automobile in the system operates as a data collector. As various street segments are traversed, the travel time for each segment is recorded. The travel time and street segment information is periodically transferred to the central database through the cellular telephone connection. The central database then combines the travel time data from each automobile to create accurate travel time data for each street segment.

Automobile navigation system with dynamic traffic data

A context-based dictionary entry access system includes selecting and rang an entry based on the part-of-speech assigned to the given word in a sentence. The entries corresponding to the word in context are first selected, followed by availability of entries that are not relevant to the current context. The part of speech of the given word in context is selected based on the utilization of a part-of-speech tagger such that only those entries are selected in which the corresponding word makes syntactic sense in the sentence.

Context based system for accessing dictionary entries

In a grammar checking system in which a sentence is first tagged as to pa of speech, the probability of the sequence of the parts of speech being correct is utilized to correct improper use of troublesome words, especially those identical sounding words which are spelled differently. The system corrects word usage based not on the probability of the entire sentence being correct but rather on the probability of the sequence of the parts of speech being correct. As part of the subject invention, the parts of speech sequence probability is utilized in part of speech sequence verification, underlying spelling recovery, auxiliary verb correction, determiner correction, and in a context-sensitive dictionary lookup.

System for correcting grammar based on parts of speech probability

A system is provided for spelling correction in which the context of a word n a sentence is utilized to determine which of several alternative or possible words was intended. The probability that a particular alternative was the word that was intended is determined through Bayesian analysis utilizing multiple kinds of features of the context of the target word, such as the presence of certain characteristic words within some distance of the target word, or the presence of certain characteristic patterns of words and part-of-speech tags around the target word. The system successfully combines multiple types of features via Bayesian analysis through means for resolving egregious interdependencies among features. The system first recognizes the interdependencies, and then resolves them by deleting all but the strongest feature involved in each interdependency, thereby allowing it to make its decisions based on the strongest non-conflicting set of features. In addition, the robustness of the system's decisions is enhanced by the pruning or deletion from consideration of certain features, in one case by deleting features for which there is insufficient evidence in the training corpus to support reliable decision-making, and secondly by deleting features which are uninformative at discriminating among the alternative spellings of the target word under consideration.

System for spelling correction in which the context of a target word in

In a grammar checking system in which a sentence is first tagged as to parts of speech, the probability of the sequence of the parts of speech being correct is utilized to correct improper use of troublesome words, especially those identical sounding words which are spelled differently. The system corrects word usage based not on the probability of the entire sentence being correct but rather on the probability of the sequence of the parts of speech being correct. As part of the subject invention, the parts of speech sequence probability is utilized in part of speech sequence verification, underlying spelling recovery, auxiliary verb correction, determiner correction, and in a context-sensitive dictionary lookup.

System for correcting grammer based parts on speech probability

In a grammar checking system which includes first tagging a sentence as to parts of speech, a module is provided for correcting incorrect auxiliary verb sequences involving two or more verbs by first detecting the starting and ending points of the error and then correcting the indicated verbs through the utilization of a directed acyclic graph containing the set of correct auxiliary verb sequences constructed for all possible such sequences. Thereafter, a further directed graph functions as a finite state transducer for proposing corrections for incorrect auxiliary verb sequences as determined by the aforementioned acyclic graph of incorrect verb sequences.

System for correcting auxiliary verb sequences

In a grammar checking system which includes first tagging a sentence as to parts of speech and recovery of underlying spellings, a system for the correction of inflections includes identifying typical example of words which do not follow normal rules either as to pluralization, past tense, past participle, comparative formation and superlative formation, with this unique list of incorrect words forming the basis for suggesting suitable replacement words the system first performs a conventional spell check to detect mispellings by dictionary lookup system. Thereafter correct words are suggested based on an English dictionary and on the root forms and the morphological features derived from the incorrect words in the compendium.

Word inflection correction system

In a grammar checking system which includes first tagging a sentence as to parts of speech, underlying spelling is recovered by removing the effects of capitalization of a word so that appropriate inflection and or spelling can be suggested by the system. In order to determine the underlying spelling the system determines whether a noun is a proper noun through the utilization of a part of speech tagger and the utilization of part of speech trigram probabilities, with capitalized and uncapitalized versions of the word having different trigram probabilities. The system also establishes whether a word is an ordinary word as opposed to a proper noun or other intrinsically capitalized word. With the system further determining which of two interpretations of the word is the best one.

System for underlying spelling recovery

In a grammar checking system which includes first tagging a sentence as to parts of speech, an improper determiner correction module detects improper referents of a noun phrase and suggests insertion of a determiner should one be necessary or the deletion of an improper determiner. To detect improper use of a determiner, parts of speech tags are utilized to characterize a sentence, thus to identify noun phrases by maximally matching a pattern that defines which sequences of parts of speech tags constitute valid noun phrases. This is accomplished by identifying the start of the noun phrase and its end to permit checking for either missing determiners, extraneous determiners, or lack of agreement in number for the constituents of the noun phrase. Once a noun phrase is found, the system tests to see if the noun is a head noun and thereafter if the head noun is a singular non-proper noun, whether the noun phrase contains a determiner, whether the noun phrase is a title, whether the head noun is a mass noun or whether the noun phrase is part of an idiom. The system also checks to see if the head noun is a proper noun and if so whether the noun phrase contains a determiner. Finally, if the noun phrase contains a determiner the system checks if the determiner agrees in number with the head noun. In this manner, both missing determiners, extraneous determiners and determiner noun number disagreement are detected and reported.

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Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Andrew R Golding