Thomson Reuters Global Resources

West Services, Inc.

Thomson Reuters Global Resources Unlimited Company

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre Gmbh

Thomson Legal Regulatory Global Ag

Khalid Al-Kofahi

Kevin Koch

Sameena Shah

Jack G Conrad

Peter Jackson

Isabelle Moulinier

Marc Light

Michael Dahn

Wenhui Liao

Timothy Earl Travers

Alex Tyrell

Craig Larson

Joel Hurwitz

David Demoss

Jason E Rollins

James N Turner

Tonya Custis

Qiang Lu

Thomas Zielund

Joel Aaron Hurwitz

Ellen Rotenberg

Jacob Sisk

Dietmar H Dorr

Patrick Slaven

Charles Elberti

Charles Macomber

Christine Killian

Badrinath Roysam

Marc Noel Light

Quang Lu

The present invention provides a method and system and software that allow users to readily access online legal research tools, while using other applications, such as word processors. One exemplary computer-implemented system provide an add-on software framework that integrates into a host word-processing application on a client access device. The add-on software framework allows users to select from an expandable listing of one or more web applications on a web server, with each of the web application capable of controlling operation of the host word processing application. The web applications facilitate extraction and access to information from the information-retrieval services as well as secondary source reference texts and incorporation of the information in the document or in metadata associated with the document. The present invention allows seamless user experience across host application, such as traditional word processing applications, and Information Service Providers (ISP), such as legal research database and searching tools, and Secondary sources, such as reference texts related to primary source documents, e.g., case law and statues, associated with the ISP service.

Method and system for integrating web-based systems with local document processing applications

Systems and techniques are disclosed to rank documents by analyzing a query log generated by a search engine. The query log includes data relating to user behavior, queries and documents. The systems and techniques distill query log information into surrogate documents and extract features from these surrogate documents to rank the documents.

Feature engineering and user behavior analysis

A method includes analyzing a cluster of conceptually-related portions of text to develop a model and calculating a novelty measurement between a first identified conceptually-related portion of text and the model. The method further includes transmitting a second identified conceptually-related portion of text and a score associated with the novelty measurement from a server to an access device via a signal. Another method includes determining at least two corpora of conceptually-related portions of text. The method also includes calculating a common neighbors similarity measurement between the at least two corpora of conceptually-related portions of text and if the common neighbors similarity measurement exceeds a threshold, merging the at least two corpora of conceptually-related portions of text into a cluster or if the common neighbors similarity measurement does not exceed a threshold, maintaining a non-merge of the at least two corpora of conceptually-related portions of text.

Systems and methods for determining atypical language

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and/or related systems, the present inventors devised, among other things, an exemplary legal research system that performs a conventional search to identify a set of starter documents and then leverages the metadata associated with these starter documents to identify another larger set of relevant documents. Documents in this alternate set are then scored using, for example, a learning machine and feature vectors that account for metadata relationships between the starter documents and alternate documents.

Systems, methods, and software for identifying relevant legal documents

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and related IR systems, the present inventors recognized researchers often overlook some types of documents, such as legal encyclopedias and treatises that may be useful to them. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that automatically search for other types of documents not specifically targeted by user queries. One exemplary system automatically submits a user query for legal opinions to first and second databases, with the first storing legal opinions and the second storing non-opinion documents, such as headnotes from the West Key Number System, articles from American Law Reports, and/or articles from American Jurisprudence.

Systems, methods, interfaces and software for extending search results beyond initial query-defined boundaries

The present invention provides systems, methods, and software for automatically processing data included in a document and identifying and recommending citations matching the processed data. The system allows a user to select and submit text segment(s) for analysis and to select from a set of recommended citations a citation(s) that matches the text segment as well as profile data for inclusion in the document. One or more citation libraries or authority databases are queried to find citations for recommendation which best match the text segment selected and submitted by the author. The system automatically processes data submitted by an author to generate a set of recommended citations for consideration and for inclusion within a document while the document is presented by a document rendering application. A selected citation is then formatted and inserted in the document.

Systems, methods, and software for processing, presenting, and recommending citations

To improve traditional keyword based search engines, the present inventors devised, among other things, systems, methods, and software that use word co-occurrence probabilities not only to identify documents conceptually related to user queries, but also to score and rank search results. One exemplary system combines inverse-document-frequency searching with concept searching based on word co-occurrence probabilities to facilitate finding of documents that would otherwise go unfound using a given query. The exemplary system also allows ranking of search results based both on both keyword matching and concept presence, promoting more efficient organization and review of search results.

Information-retrieval systems, methods, and software with concept-based searching and ranking

The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case. One specific embodiment retrieves prior-case candidates based on information extracted from an input case, and then uses a support vector machine to determine which of the prior-case candidates are most probably prior cases for the input case.

System, method, and software for identifying historically related legal cases

System, method, and software for identifying historically related legal opinions

To reduce cost and improve accuracy, the inventors devised systems, methods, and software to aid classification of text, such as headnotes and other documents, to target classes in a target classification system. For example, one system computes composite scores based on: similarity of input text to text assigned to each of the target classes; similarity of non-target classes assigned to the input text and target classes; probability of a target class given a set of one or more non-target classes assigned to the input text; and/or probability of the input text given text assigned to the target classes. The exemplary system then evaluates the composite scores using class-specific decision criteria, such as thresholds, ultimately assigning or recommending assignment of the input text to one or more of the target classes. The exemplary system is particularly suitable for classification systems having thousands of classes.

Systems, methods, and software for classifying text from judicial opinions and other documents

A method for rapid, fully automatic, two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) tracing of line-structure images, such as images of neurons produced by fluorescence confocal microscopy. A method of recursively following the line-structure topology, guided by the correlation response of a set of 4&#xd7;Ndirectional kernels in the 3-D case, and a set of 2&#xd7;N directional kernels in the 2-D case, is presented. These kernels are derived based on a generalized cylinder model of the line-structures. The automatic tracing method includes a protocol for determining the ends of line-structures.

Method and apparatus for automatically tracing line-structure images

Growing community of inventors

Rosemount, MN, United States of America

Khalid Al-Kofahi