Patent ID: 7536369

Claim:
A rule induction method performed by a machine learning system configured to perform categorization using learned rules, rule induction method comprising: selecting an overbroad candidate rule for categorizing a node to be categorized; specializing the candidate rule by: (i) identifying a related node other than the node to be categorized using an XML structural interface, the related node being (1) one of a parent node, a child node, and a sibling node of the node to be categorized, or (2) one of a parent node, a child node, and a sibling node of a previously identified related node, (ii) adding one or more candidate rules associated with attributes of a rule node, (iii) evaluating the specialized candidate rule respective to a set of training examples, and (iv) terminating the specializing when the specialized candidate rule satisfies a termination criterion to generate a specialized rule; and categorizing or predicting an attribute of an object using the specialized rule.