Patent ID: 8001130

Claim:
A computing system with a processor and a memory for determining relevance of an object to a target term, the object being a product, comprising: a component that retrieves a plurality of web pages containing a description of the object, each description including terms used to describe the object; a component that generates a collection of records of terms relating to the object, the collection including a record generated from each of the plurality of retrieved web pages, each record including a plurality of terms, each record of the collection being generated by extracting from a retrieved web page terms used to describe the object, such that the terms extracted from that retrieved web page compose the record of terms for that retrieved web page; a component that, for each record of the collection of records of terms relating to the object, determines a language model probability for that record generating the target term, the language model probability for that record generating the target term being a weighted summation of a number of occurrences of the target term in the record divided by a number of occurrences of all terms in the record and a number of occurrences of the target term in the collection of the records divided by a number of occurrences of all terms in the collection of the records as represented by the following equation: P ⁡ ( w ❘ D ) = λ · tf ⁡ ( w , D )  D  + ( 1 - λ ) · tf ⁡ ( w , C )  C  where |D| represents the number of occurrences of terms in record D, tf(w,D) represents the number of occurrences of the target term w in record D, C represents the number of occurrences of terms in the collection C of records, tf(w,C) represents the number of occurrences of target term w in the collection C of records, and λ represents a parameter with a value greater than 0 and less than 1; and a component that calculates the relevance of the object to the target term based on a summation of the language model probability of each of the plurality of the records wherein the components are implemented as computer-executable instructions stored in the memory for execution by the processor.