Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Hideki Yasukawa

Tsuyoshi Ueno

Yoshihiro Noguchi

Masaki Hoshida

Masato Ishikawa

Mitsuhiro Sato

Naohiko Noguchi

Hiroyuki Suzuki

Hayashi Ito

Yuji Kanno

Takao Isogawa

Yoshio Fukushige

Masaki Kiyono

Fumiyuki Kato

Yutaka Tomioka

Mitsuaki Inaba

Masako Nomoto

Hayashi Itou

To provide a system for processing program information in which the display structure of a program table can be freely changed in accordance with a requirement of or the taste of an audience, the system for processing program information is structured to include program information storage meansfor storing program information, and program table display meansfor two-dimensionally displaying a program table employing as the two axes, two attributesandselected from among all of the attributes that have been given to each piece of program information, to make the program table. For the audience, program tables of various constructions can be displayed on the display means at will and in respective program retrieval operations, a program table that is easy to use to search for a program can be obtained. An specific desired program can be found in a short time by selecting key word(s) related to each program and extracting them from the program or the like. This is useful for an audience member to make a plan of desired broadcasts for himself.

System for processing program information

In a document retrieving apparatus, an audio input section converts a sound into a character pattern. A language model storing section stores likelihood information. A word choosing section obtains a word selection result based on the likelihood information. A retrieval condition producing section produces retrieval conditions based on the word selection result. A document storing section stores document to be retrieved. And, a document retrieving section retrieves the documents based on the retrieval conditions. An effective document search can be performed regardless of the sentence recognition accuracy without requiring higher cost in collecting the required language data.

Document retrieving apparatus and document retrieving method

An agent presentation apparatus for transmitting and receiving a message and operating based on a knowledge base and a rule base. In particular, where an agent for carrying out a user request uses knowledge of a knowledge description or an action description between agents and executes communication, for example. An agent can request a WWW page locally or remotely over a network to retrieve already existing contents and make a presentation that might include one or more of images, voice, and text along with the WWW page. The apparatus can also respond to user questions about the WWW page using the knowledge description and/or the action description, for example.

Agent presentation apparatus

A knowledge provider system is configured as a plurality of data servers connected via a data communication network, which function as respective knowledge provider agents in response to information request messages sent from users of the network. Each agent holds a script which contains a knowledge base, and data defining predetermined message formats for respective types of messages and predetermined content formats for respective types of message contents which can be handled by that agent. A message received by an agent is pattern-matched against the message formats, if it is thereby found to be an information request message the message content portion is pattern-matched against the predetermined content formats, and if that matching is successful, the subject for which information is requested is pattern-matched against the contents of the knowledge base, to find a set of information corresponding to that subject. If any of the pattern matching operations is not successful, the agent originates messages for successively propagating the content portion of that information request message to other agents via the network. Obtained information is then sent back to the originating agent and hence to the user.

Knowledge provider system and knowledge providing method utilizing plural knowledge provider agents which are linked by communication network and execute message processing using successive pattern matching operations

One of prepared types of agent characteristics types is set to an agent, and parameters used in agent operation are set for values associated with the set agent characteristic type, thereby causing the agent to operate according to the agent characteristic type. An agent script base contains a plurality of operation descriptions. In response to a command from the user, parameters used in the execution of the command are set for the above values. The parameters are preferably kept in a table. Then, one of the operation descriptions associated with the command is executed referring to the table. Setting a user's characteristic type causes the set agent characteristic type to be changed to one associated with the user's characteristic type.

Agent system which operates according to a characteristic being set thereto

A document retrieval system for searching a document coinciding with a retrieval request the user inputs and further ranking the document in accordance with the degree of coincidence between the document and the retrieval request. In the document retrieval system, a word frequency calculating section finds out the number of documents where a word appears, a frequency of occurrence of the word in a document and obtains a weighting parameter for the word, and a frequency score calculating section obtains a frequency score on the basis of the output of the word frequency calculating section. In addition, a word cooccurrence relation checking section checks word cooccurrence relations of the retrieval request and the document, and a cooccurrence score calculating section calculates a cooccurrence score from the degree of coincidence therebetween. A document score calculating section calculates a document score on the basis of the frequency score and the cooccurrence score. The documents are ranked in order of document score and displayed to the user.

Document retrieval system

The present invention provides an agent communication system, which can reduce special environment as far as possible, can interactively communicate with users, can cope with dynamic situations and can operate intelligently. The electronic mail passes through electronic mail delivery means 103 and electronic mail storage means 104. Agent mail storage means 104 recognizes an agent mail, and at its notification, scriptizing means 106 converts the mail to a script, and the script is stored in script storage means 107. Script executing means 108 executes the script and an instruction from user input means 101, and it is outputted to output means 109. Then, at a notification of the script executing means 108, electronic mail preparing means 102 prepares an electronic mail, and it is distributed to the electronic mail delivery means 103.

Agent communication system with dynamic change of declaratory script

A hypertext document and anchor sentences of parent documents for the hypertext document are registered with an hypertext document identifier as document information for each of hypertext documents having reference relationships with each other. A user can refer to one hypertext document according to an anchor sentence of another hypertext document functioning as a parent document. Also, occurrence positions of one word in hypertext documents and parent documents are registered as word information for each of words. When a keyword is input, a plurality of particular hypertext documents and particular parent documents in which the keyword appears are specified according to the word information, one particular hypertext document and corresponding particular parent documents are unified to a unified hypertext document for each particular hypertext document, an occurrence frequency of the keyword in each unified hypertext document is calculated according to the document information, importance degrees of the unified hypertext documents are calculated as those of the particular hypertext documents according to the occurrence frequencies, and ranking of the particular hypertext documents are determined according to those importance degrees. Because the occurrence frequency is calculated by considering the parent documents, the particular hypertext documents can be appropriately ranked.

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Tokyo, Japan

Hideki Yasukawa