International Business Machines Corporation

Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.p.

Soumen Chakrabarti

Byron Edward Dom

Prabhakar Raghavan

David Andrew Gibson

Sridhar Rajagopalan

Andrew Stephen Tomkins

Shanmugasundaram Ravikumar

Martin Henk Van Den Berg

Rakesh Agrawal

Kevin Snow McCurley

Sunita Sarawagi

Somnath Banerjee

Jon Michael Kleinberg

Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Piotr Indyk

Disclosed is a method of querying a collection of electronic documents, comprising defining a query for retrieving a numerical answer, said query comprising one or more search terms and a tolerance for said numerical answer; defining a set of document portions from said collection, each document portion in said set being extracted from an electronic document and comprising at least one term relevant to at least one of the one or more search terms and a numerical value associated with the at least one term; ordering the associated numerical values contained in said set; defining a plurality of results groups, each results group comprising an interval of ordered numerical values, each interval having a range not exceeding the tolerance; ranking the results groups; and returning at least the interval of the highest ranked results group as a response to said query A computer program product for executing this method on a computer processor and a server are also disclosed.

Method and system for searching unstructured textual data for quantitative answers to queries

A Web server stores a table of Web page inlinks. When a Web page is accessed and a user wants to access other pages related to the accessed page, the user requests the table of inlinks, and from it generates a list of sibling links to the accessed page, the sibling links being outlinks of one or more of the inlinks in the table.

Method and system for distributed autonomous maintenance of bidirectional hyperlink metadata on the web and similar hypermedia repository

A system and method are provided for eliciting interesting structure from a collection of entities or resources with explicit and/or implicit, static and/or dynamic relations, called 'affinities,' between them. Interesting structure includes (1) notions of quality, authority, or definitiveness of information, (2) notions of relevance to a user's information need, (3) notions of similarity among the plurality of resources retrieved from a universe of resources by a query process, and (4) notions of similarity among the usages of resources by different users/servers. Similarities between entities are computed, based on similarities between the affinity values for the entities. That is, where the affinitiy values for two entities resemble each other, the two entities have a high degree of similarity. Using the similarities, the entities are ranked, clustered, etc., based on a significance derived from the similarities. The ranking, clustering, etc., makes up the interesting structure which is sought.

Method and system for filtering of information entities

A system and method for optimizing I/O to low-level index access during bulk-routing through a taxonomy to classify documents, e.g., Web pages, in the taxonomy. In a first optimization, bulk-routing is regarded as a generalized join operation in a relational database framework. In a second optimization, instead of processing each document individually through nodes of the taxonomy, a group of documents are processed node by node in a wavefront-style routing scheme for better amortization of index probes.

System and method for dynamic index-probe optimizations for high-dimensional similarity search

A focussed Web crawler learns to recognize Web pages that are relevant to the interest of one or more users, from a set of examples provided by the users. It then explores the Web starting from the example set, using the statistics collected from the examples and other analysis on the link graph of the growing crawl database, to guide itself towards relevant, valuable resources and away from irrelevant and/or low quality material on the Web. Thereby, the Web crawler builds a comprehensive topic-specific library for the benefit of specific users.

System and method for focussed web crawling

A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for a computer implemented hypertext classifier. A new document containing citations to and from other documents is classified. Initially, documents within a neighborhood of the new document are identified. For each document and each class, an initial probability is determined that indicates the probability that the document fits a particular class. Next, iterative relaxation is performed to identify a class for each document using the initial probabilities. A class is selected into which the new document is to be classified based on the initial probabilities and identified classes.

Enhanced hypertext categorization using hyperlinks

A method for identifying, filtering, ranking and cataloging information elements; as for example, World Wide Web pages, of the Internet in whole, part, or in combination. The method is preferably implemented in computer software and features steps for enabling a user to interactively create an information database including preferred information elements such as preferred World Wide Web pages in whole, part, or in combination. The method includes steps for enabling a user to interactively create a frame-based, hierarchical organizational structure for the information elements, and steps for identifying and automatically filtering and ranking by relevance, information elements, such as World Wide Web pages for populating the structure, to form; for example, a searchable, World Wide Web page database. Additionally, the method features steps for enabling a user to interactively define a frame-based, hierarchical information structure for cataloging information, identifying a preliminary population of information elements for a particular hierarchical category arranged as a frame, based upon the respective frame attributes, and thereafter, expanding the information population to include related information, and subsequently, automatically filtering and ranking the information based upon relevance, and then populating the hierarchical structure with the a definable portion of the filtered, ranked information elements.

Method for interactively creating an information database including preferred information elements, such as preferred-authority, world wide web pages

A method for cataloging, filtering and ranking information, as for example, World Wide Web pages of the Internet. The method is preferably implemented in computer software and features steps for enabling a user to interactively create an information database including preferred information elements such as preferred-authority World Wide Web pages. The method includes steps for enabling a user to interactively create a frame-based, hierarchical organizational structure for the information elements, and steps for identifying and automatically filtering and ranking by relevance, information elements, such as World Wide Web pages for populating the structure, to form, for example, a searchable, World Wide Web page database. Additionally, the method features steps for enabling a user to interactively define a frame-based, hierarchical information structure for cataloging information, identifying a preliminary population of information elements for a particular hierarchical category arranged as a frame, based upon the respective frame attributes, and thereafter, expanding the information population to include related information, and subsequently, automatically filtering and ranking the information based upon relevance, and then populating the hierarchical structure with a definable portion of the filtered, ranked information elements.

Method for interactively creating an information database including preferred information elements, such as, preferred-authority, world wide web pages

Method for cataloging, filtering, and relevance ranking frame-based hierarchical information structures

A system, process, and article of manufacture for organizing a large text database into a hierarchy of topics and for maintaining this organization as documents are added and deleted and as the topic hierarchy changes. Given sample documents belonging to various nodes in the topic hierarchy, the tokens (terms, phrases, dates, or other usable feature in the document) that are most useful at each internal decision node for the purpose of routing new documents to the children of that node are automatically detected. Using feature terms, statistical models are constructed for each topic node. The models are used in an estimation technique to assign topic paths to new unlabeled documents. The hierarchical technique, in which feature terms can be very different at different nodes, leads to an efficient context-sensitive classification technique. The hierarchical technique can handle millions of documents and tens of thousands of topics. A resulting taxonomy and path enhanced retrieval system (TAPER) is used to generate context-dependent document indexing terms. The topic paths are used, in addition to keywords, for better focused searching and browsing of the text database.

Multilevel taxonomy based on features derived from training documents classification using fisher values as discrimination values

A system and method for data mining is provided in which temporal patterns of itemsets in transactions having unexpected support values are identified. A surprising temporal pattern is an itemset whose support changes over time. The method may use a minimum description length formulation to discover these surprising temporal patterns.

System and method for mining surprising temporal patterns

A system and method for ranking wide area computer network (e.g., Web) pages by popularity in response to a query. Further, using a query and the response thereto from a search engine, the system and method finds additional key words that might be good extended search terms, essentially generating a local thesaurus on the fly at query time.

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Maharashtra, India

Soumen Chakrabarti