Patent ID: 8452781

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for using banded topic relevance and time for article prioritization, comprising: maintaining articles of digital information and at least one social index comprising topics that each relate to one or more of the articles; retrieving fine-grained topic models matched to the digital information for each topic; succinctly classifying the articles under the topics by testing the articles against the fine-grained topic models; for each topic in the at least one social index, maintaining a coarse-grained topic model comprising: specifying characteristic words extracted from the articles identified by the fine-grained topic models of each topic; and assigning scores to the characteristic words; for each of the articles within the topic under which the article was classified, accumulating the scores of the characteristic words into a relevancy score for that article; selecting only the articles within the topic having relevancy scores satisfying a minimum threshold relevancy; for each topic in the at least one social index, arranging the selected articles into discrete bands with each discrete band representing comparable levels of relevancy, comprising: setting a range of relevancy scores for each discrete band; and classifying each of the articles within the topic into the discrete band within whose range of relevancy scores the article's relevancy score falls; temporally sorting the articles within each of the discrete bands; and presenting the temporally-sorted articles within the discrete bands.