Patent ID: 7860853

Claim:
An automated method of document matching using asymmetrical signature generation, the method comprising: receiving documents from a document repository; generating signatures for each of the documents using a first signature generator; providing the signatures and a document identifier for each of the documents to a signature database; receiving an input document; generating signatures for the input document using a second signature generator; and searching the signature database using the signatures generated for the input document, wherein the first and second signature generators are configured such that different numbers of signatures are generated for a same document, and wherein the first and second signature generators each: receive a document comprising a plurality of characters; normalize the document to remove non-informative characters from the plurality of characters; calculate a score for each informative character of the plurality of characters based on an occurrence frequency and distribution in the document; rank each informative character of the plurality of characters based on the calculated score; select, from the ranked informative characters, character occurrences; and generate a signature for each selected character occurrence.