Patent ID: 6523026
Filing Date: 2003-02-18
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for selectively retrieving records or portions of records which contain information relative to at least one chosen term, said method comprising:a) receiving a well defined first body of records selected from a first knowledge domain; b) computing by means of a processing unit an abstract representation of terms from said well defined first body of records, said abstract representation encoding the characteristic co-occurrence relationships between terms in said first domain, and storing said abstract representation in a storage unit; c) employing said stored abstract representation of term co-occurrence relationships to retrieve records relevant to one or more terms from said first body of records, said relevant records retrieved from within a second body of records stored in the storage unit; wherein said second body of records is selected from at least one other knowledge domain which is semantically distant from said first knowledge domain and wherein said second body of records is substantially free of records containing said chosen terms or any synonyms of said chosen terms; and d) displaying said relevant records as retrieved in step c as an output, said output indicating the relative degree of relevance of each retrieved record with respect to at least one of said chosen terms wherein each of said chosen terms or synonym thereof, from said first knowledge domain is represented in a majority of the records in said first body of records and said abstract representation of terms from said first knowledge domain is a set of term vectors in a single multi-dimensional vector space, said set of term vectors computed from said well defined first body of records representing said first domain; the relative orientations of said term vectors in said multi-dimensional space collectively encoding the term co-occurrence relationships characteristic of said first domain.