Patent ID: 9372843
Filing Date: 2016-06-21
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A document association device comprising: a document memory that stores one or more electronic documents each including a plurality of elements; a display unit that displays on a screen a first group of elements included in a first electronic document stored in the document memory, and a second group of elements included in a second electronic document stored in the document memory; an operation receiving unit that receives a reference operation which is targeted at one or more elements in the first group of elements, and that receives an editing operation which is targeted at one or more elements in the second group of elements; an association unit that, when the operation receiving unit receives an editing operation after a reference operation that corresponds to the editing operation has been received, associates the one or more elements targeted by the reference operation with the one or more elements targeted by the editing operation, and stores association information indicating the association of the elements; a reference score memory that stores a relevance score for each type of reference operation; a relevance calculation unit that calculates a relevance between associated elements that arc associated with each other by the association unit, based on a relevance score for the type of the reference operation corresponding to the associated elements; and a reference frequency recording unit that records, for each element, a reference frequency of the element indicating the number of times the element has been associated as an element targeted by the reference operation, wherein the relevance calculation unit calculates the relevance between the associated elements based on the reference frequencies of the elements.