Patent ID: 8046360

Claim:
A method of annotating documents of a corpus to facilitate extracting structured information from the corpus, comprising: determining a clustering of the documents into a plurality of similar characteristics clusters, such that each similar characteristics cluster is characterized in that the documents within that cluster have a similarity measure above a first similarity threshold, and there are one or more overlap clusters, each overlap cluster including one or more similar characteristics clusters such that all documents of the one or more similar characteristics clusters included in that overlap cluster have a similarity measure above a second similarity threshold, the second similarity threshold being lower than the first similarity threshold; designating a particular overlap cluster of the one or more overlap clusters; designating a particular similar characteristics cluster of the designated particular overlap cluster; obtaining an annotation for that designated similar characteristics cluster, wherein the annotation is a representation of important nodes of the documents in the designated similar characteristics cluster; and transferring the annotation to one or more other similar characteristics clusters, if any, included in the designated particular overlap cluster for use with the documents in the one or more other similar characteristics clusters.