Patent ID: 7017110

Claim:
A method for inferring an information need from a plurality of usage documents in a collection of linked documents accessed by a user, comprising: for each document in the collection of linked documents, identifying incoming and outgoing link information among the documents to produce a document topology matrix, wherein said linked documents include a plurality of content items indicated by keywords; receiving an observed user path item, wherein the observed user path item indicates the plurality of usage documents accessed by the user using the incoming and outgoing link information among the documents; applying a network flow model to the document topology matrix using the observed user path item as an activation source to produce a document vector indicating documents in the collection of linked documents having predicted relevance to the plurality of usage documents; producing a document word frequency matrix indicating a frequency distribution of occurrences of the keywords in each of said documents in the collection of linked documents; and comparing the document vector produced by applying the network flow model to the document word frequency matrix to determine set of keywords indicating the inferred information need based on the plurality of usage documents accessed by the user.