Patent ID: 7249312

Claim:
A computer implemented method for scoring of an attribute exhibited in a corpus of unstructured documents, the method comprising: storing a plurality of scoring models, each of the scoring models associated with a different method of combining subdocument scores for a document, wherein the plurality of scoring models comprises: a first scoring model for determining an average degree to which the attribute is present in the document; a second scoring model for determining a maximum degree to which the attribute is present in the document; a third scoring model for determining a total degree to which the attribute is present in the document; and a fourth scoring model for determining an amount of change in the attribute in the subdocuments of the document over a period of time; decomposing each unstructured document into subdocuments; determining an attribute score for each subdocument in the corpus corresponding to the level said subdocument exhibits a feature associated with the attribute; and combining subdocument attribute scores for each document to produce a document attribute score, further comprising: selecting a scoring model for scoring the documents; and for each document, determining a document attribute score for the document by applying the selected scoring model to the subdocument scores of the subdocuments of the document.