At+t Corp.

Lucent Technologies Inc.

Aol Inc.

Health Discovery Corporation

Mercury Kingdom Assets Limited

Kroll Ontrack, Inc.

David Dolan Lewis

Abdur Chowdhury

Aleksander R Kolcz

Amitabh Kumar Singhal

Daniel Leon Stern

Steven Michael Beitzel

Kenneth Ward Church

Isabelle Guyon

Edith Cohen

Jason Aaron Edward Weston

Jonathan Isaac Helfman

Kevin B Thompson

Edward P Reiss

René Doursat

William Arthur Gale

Jason A Catlett

Kimberly A Knowles

Jeffrey David Naslund

A query phrase may be automatically classified to one or more topics of interest (e.g., categories) to assist in routing the query phrase to one or more appropriate backend databases. A selectional preference query classification technique may be used to classify the query phrase based on a comparison between the query phrase and patterns of query phrases. Additionally, or alternatively, a combination of query classification techniques may be used to classify the query phrase. Topical classification of a query phrase also may be used to assist a search system in delivering auxiliary information to a user who entered the query phrase. Advertisements, for instance, may be tailored based on classification rather than query keywords.

Web query classification

An example method for reviewing documents includes scoring documents using an artificial intelligence model, and selecting a subset of highest scoring documents. The method further includes inserting a number of randomly-selected documents into the subset of highest scoring documents to form a set of documents for review, wherein a reviewer cannot differentiate between the randomly-selected documents and the subset of highest scoring documents included in the set of documents for review, and presenting the set of documents for review by the reviewer.

Electronic review of documents

The data mining platform comprises a plurality of system modules, each formed from a plurality of components. Each module has an input data component, a data analysis engine for processing the input data, an output data component for outputting the results of the data analysis, and a web server to access and monitor the other modules within the unit and to provide communication to other units. Each module processes a different type of data, for example, a first module processes microarray (gene expression) data while a second module processes biomedical literature on the Internet for information supporting relationships between genes and diseases and gene functionality. In the preferred embodiment, the data analysis engine is a kernel-based learning machine, and in particular, one or more support vector machines (SVMs). The data analysis engine includes a pre-processing function for feature selection, for reducing the amount of data to be processed by selecting the optimum number of attributes, or 'features', relevant to the information to be discovered.

Data mining platform for bioinformatics and other knowledge discovery

Apparatus for adding new learning tasks to an incremental supervised learner provides a flexible incremental representation of all encountered training examples, thereby permitting state representations for new learning tasks to take advantage of incremental training already completed by encoding all past training examples as negative examples for a hypothetical learning task. The state representation of the hypothetical learning task is copied as the initial state representation for a new learning task to be initiated, and is initialized with negative training examples of all previously presented training examples, thereby permitting the learning task to efficiently incorporate the previous examples.

Methods and apparatus for communicating information in a supervised learning system

A method and apparatus for adding new learning tasks to an incremental supervised learner provide a flexible incremental representation of all training examples encountered, thereby permitting state representations for new learning tasks to take advantage of incremental training already completed by encoding all past training examples as negative examples for a hypothetical learning task. The state representation of the hypothetical learning task is copied as the initial state representation for a new learning task to be initiated, is initialized with negative training examples of all previously presented training examples, thereby permitting the learning task to incorporate the previous examples efficiently.

A method and apparatus for communicating accumulated state information between internal and external tasks in a supervised learning system. A supervised learning system encodes state information for a hypothetical learning task on initialization. This hypothetical learning task state information indicates that no training instances have been received. During the supervised learning, training instances are presented to the supervised learner. The training instances are encoded with feature vector and target value information. For each task name paired with a non-default target value, the learner initializes a new learning task by copying the hypothetical learning task state representation for use as the state representation for the new learning task. Predictors are then produced for all learning tasks, except the hypothetical learning task. The new training instance is used to update all learning tasks as specified in the target vector. The new training instance is then used.to update the hypothetical learning task state representation as a negative example. Further training instances are handled similarly, new learning tasks are started based on the examination of the sparse target vector for task name, target value pairs which match received training instance target values and for which tasks have not yet been started.

An information retrieval method wherein users may submit a query via a graphical bitmapping technique. The user provides an information retrieval system with a bitmap of a printed, written, or graphical query by either scanning the query with a graphical scanner, or employing a standard facsimile transmission machine. The information retrieval system then performs an optical image/character recognition process upon the received bitmap to determine the content of the query, information is then retried based upon the recognized characters and images. In a particular method of the invention, the user is provided with a bitmap of the retrieved information.

Method for retrieving texts which are similar to a sample text

The invention is an improved retrieval system and method. Many pattern recognition tasks, including estimation, classification, and the finding of similar objects, make use of linear models. For example, many text retrieval systems represent queries as linear functions, and retrieve documents whose vector representation has a high dot product with the query. The fundamental operation in such tasks is the computation of the dot product between a query vector and a large database of instance vectors. Often instance vectors which have high dot products with the query are of interest. The invention relates to a random sampling based retrieval system that can identify, for any given query vector, those instance vectors which have large dot products, while avoiding explicit computation of all dot products.

Retrieval system and method

Current tools for processing e-mail and other messages do not adequately recognize and manipulate threads, i.e., conversations among two or more people carried out by exchange of messages. The present invention utilizes the textual context and characteristics of messages in order to provide a more reliable and effective way to construct message threads. In accordance with the present invention, statistical information retrieval techniques are used in conjunction with textual material obtained by 'filtering' of messages to achieve a significant level of accuracy at identifying when one message is a reply to another.

Finding an e-mail message to which another e-mail message is a response

A method and apparatus for training a text classifier is disclosed. A supervised learning system and an annotation system are operated cooperatively to produce a classification vector which can be used to classify documents with respect to a defined class. The annotation system automatically annotates documents with a degree of relevance annotation to produce machine annotated data. The degree of relevance annotation represents the degree to which the document belongs to the defined class. This machine annotated data is used as input to the supervised learning system. In addition to the machine annotated data, the supervised learning system can also receive manually annotated data and/or a user request. The machine annotated data, along with the manually annotated data and/or the user request, are used by the supervised learning system to produce a classification vector. In one embodiment, the supervised learning system comprises a relevance feedback mechanism. The relevance feedback mechanism is operated cooperatively with the annotation system for multiple iterations until a classification vector of acceptable accuracy is produced. The classification vector produced by the invention is the result of a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning.

Method and apparatus for training a text classifier

Apparatus and methods for training classifiers. The apparatus includes a degree of certainty classifier which classifies examples in categories and indicates a degree of certainty regarding the classification and an annotating classifier which receives classified examples with a low degree of certainty from the degree of certainty classifier and annotates them to indicate whether their classifications are correct. The annotated examples are then used to train another classifier. In one version of the invention, the other classifier is a new version of the degree of certainty classifier, and training continues until the degree of certainty classifier has satisfactory performance. The degree of certainty classifier of the embodiment is a probabilistic binary classifier which is trained using relevance feedback. The annotating classifier may include an interactive interface which permits a human user of the system to examine an example and indicate whether it was properly classified.

Growing community of inventors

Chicago, IL, United States of America

David Dolan Lewis