Patent ID: 8612457

Claim:
A computer-executable method for comparing documents, the method comprising: receiving, by a computer, a number of document-similarity values s i (a,b) associated with two documents, the document-similarity values being calculated by different document-similarity calculation methods, which are indexed by i; determining weights (α i , β i ) of a respective document-similarity calculation method i for each of the two documents a and b respectively, wherein α i corresponds to document a and β i corresponds to document b, wherein determining the weights of a document-similarity calculation method involves: initializing the weights; and updating the weights based on user feedback, wherein updating the weights of the document-similarity calculation method for each document involves applying a learning algorithm to the weights based on user feedback; determining a weight-combination function ƒ(α i ,β i ) for calculating a combined weight of the respective document-similarity calculation method i associated with the two documents, wherein the weight-combination function accounts for the direction of comparison between the documents a and b; and generating, by the computer, a combined similarity value S(a,b) based on the document-similarity values calculated by k different document-similarity calculation methods and the weight-combination function, given by: S ⁡ ( a , b ) = ∑ i = 1 k ⁢ f ⁡ ( α i , β i ) · s i ⁡ ( a , b ) .