Patent ID: 7593940

Claim:
A computer implementing a method for responding to queries for information in a document corpus, the method implemented by the computer comprising: receiving the query; using at least a portion of the query as an entering argument to access a string table having an index and corresponding data, the index being a concatenated list of integers providing offsets of various character strings, the index being followed by per-string data listing each entity represented in a sparse matrix, the entities in the string table being listed in order of frequency of occurrence in a document corpus, one and only one person entity being entered in the matrix even if a person establishing the entity is referred to by plural phrases different from each other in the corpus; using a selection from the string table selected in response to the portion of the query to access a sparse matrix; and returning a response to the query at least in part based on the access of the sparse matrix, wherein the document corpus includes World Wide Web pages and the sparse matrix includes entity representations that are respective groups of sub-rows in the sparse matrix, wherein the groups are sorted relative to each other from most occurring entity to least occurring entity, with each sub-row of a group corresponding to an entity co-occurring in the document corpus with the entity represented by the group, and furthermore wherein the sub-rows within a group of sub-rows are internally sorted independently of other groups of sub-rows based on frequencies of co-occurrences within the group, from a first a sub-row indicating a highest number of co-occurrences to a last sub-row indicating a lowest number of co-occurrences.