Patent ID: 7340674

Claim:
A system for normalizing quoting styles, comprising: a storage comprising a plurality of messages, which are each partitioned into quoted and unquoted text, wherein the messages are structured as nodes of a hierarchical tree; a node processor, comprising: a message pairing module to identify a pair of the messages, which are parent and child messages; a text removal module to remove any of the quoted text that comprises the parent message in full from the child message; and a text addition module to add at least part of the parent message into the child message based on part of any of the quoted text in the child message being from and comprising an issue addressed by the parent message; a tree traversal module to process each of the messages by traversing the hierarchical tree; a vector module to obtain word vectors for each of the nodes corresponding to messages comprising at least one of quoted and unquoted text; a node pairing module to identify pairs of the nodes, comprising one of a parent-child and sibling relationship; a distance module to determine a lexical distance between each pair of the nodes; and a clustering module to generate primary clusters from those pairs of the nodes having lexical distances that indicate closely-related messages.