Patent ID: 7266554

Claim:
A document extracting apparatus, comprising: a document acquiring device to acquire a plurality of documents from an information source, according to a user-specific criteria, to be candidates for extraction; a similarity computing device to compute all degrees of similarity between the plurality of documents, and express the degrees of similarity in a symmetric matrix, the similarity computing device comprising: a character-string-dividing functional unit to divide each of the plurality of documents into predetermined character strings; a character-string frequency computing functional unit to compute document vectors of the plurality of documents on the basis of a frequency of appearance of the predetermined character strings divided by the character-string-dividing functional unit; and a mutual similarity computing functional unit to compute the degrees of similarity between the plurality of documents on the basis of the document vectors obtained from the character-string frequency computing functional unit; a combination computing device to compute all combinations of the degrees of similarity computed between the plurality of documents; a sum of degrees of similarity computing device to compute, with respect to all of the combinations, a sum of the degrees of similarity between all of the documents that constitute each combination, based on all of the degrees of similarity expressed in the symmetric matrix; and a document extracting device to extract documents constituting the combination with the smallest sum of the degrees of similarity among the plurality of documents constituting the respective combinations.