Patent ID: 6678694
Filing Date: 2004-01-13
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
An interactive document retrieval system designed to search for documents after receiving a search query from a requestor, said system comprising:a knowledge database containing at least one data structure that relates word patterns to topics; and a query processor that, in response to the receipt of a search query from a requestor, does the following searching for and trying to capture documents containing at least one term related to the search query, if any documents are captured, analyzes the captured documents to determine their word patterns, categorizing the captured documents by comparing each document's word pattern to the word patterns in the database, and when a document's word pattern is similar to a word pattern in the database, assigning to that document the similar word pattern's related topic, presenting at least one list of the topics assigned to the categorized documents to the requestor, and asking the requestor to designate at least one topic from the list as a topic that is relevant to the requestor's search, and granting the requestor access to the subset of captured and categorized documents to which topics designated by the requestor have been assigned; wherein the word patterns determined by analysis are pairings of words, each pairing comprising two searchable words with one word occurring frequently within the document and the other word occurring near the one word frequently within the document.