Patent ID: 7203679
Filing Date: 2007-04-10
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method for determining a degree of similarity between documents in a given document collection, the method comprising: modeling all said documents as labeled tree representations; building a computerized dictionary of path representations relating to paths that occur in said documents, wherein said path representations comprise a path in the tree representation of a document having a capability to include positional information of preceding sibling nodes that have a same label as a given node in a tree; storing, for at least two said documents, said labeled free representations of respective documents; storing, for said at least two said documents, said path representations relating to said paths that occur in said documents from root nodes to leaf nodes in said labeled tree representations of said respective documents; representing each of said documents in said document collection as an N-dimensional vector comprising an element i denoting a value of a feature associated with a particular path, wherein said feature comprises any of a presence or absence of said particular path in said documents and a frequency of occurrence of said particular path in said documents; calculating a measure of similarity between two of the documents based upon the frequency of occurrence of similar paths specified by the path representations; and using said measure of similarity to cluster a plurality of documents comprising similar information, wherein said documents comprise any of web page documents and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents, wherein two documents that differ only in the frequency of occurrence of the paths associated with said two documents are considered to be more similar to each other than two documents that differ in the occurrence of paths.