Patent ID: 6370525
Filing Date: 2002-04-09
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for ranking a plurality of candidate documents on the basis of the similarity each of the plurality of candidate documents to a user-query, said method comprising the steps ofparsing the user-query, thereby generating a query-word and a distribution of the query-word in the user-query, assessing an importance of the query-word on the basis of the frequency with which the query-word occurs in the plurality of candidate documents, and the distribution of the query-word in the user-query, evaluating the similarity of a candidate document to the user-query on the basis of a distribution of the query-word in the candidate document, the candidate document having at least one candidate document sentence, evaluating the similarity of the at least one candidate document sentence to the user-query on the basis of the frequency with which the query-word occurs in the at least one candidate document sentence, ranking the candidate document relative to the plurality of candidate documents on the basis of the similarity of the candidate document to the user-query and the similarity of the at least one candidate document sentence to the user-query.