Patent ID: 7024416

Claim:
A processor-implemented method for assigning categories of items to supercategories, comprising: (a) assigning a subset of the categories in the collection to supercategories manually, (b) selecting a category C i from among the categories in the collection not yet assigned to supercategories which has not yet been processed, (c) calculating a likelihood function L ik for the category C i and a category C k in the collection which has previously been assigned to a supercategory S j manually, which likelihood function is based upon the likelihood that a term occurring in the category C i also occurs in the category C k , (d) repeating step (c) for a plurality of other categories C k in the collection which have previously been assigned to a supercategory S j manually, (e) assigning the category C i to a supercategory S j based on the likelihood functions L ik that a term occurring in the category C i also occurs in the category C k which is assigned to supercategory S j , and (f) repeating steps (b)–(e) for a plurality of other categories in the collection which have not yet been assigned to supercategories and which have not yet been processed.