Patent ID: 8117075

Claim:
A method in a computer system for identifying documents in a set of documents relevant to a distinguished document, comprising the steps of: determining, in the computer system, an inverse document frequency for each one of a plurality of key words within the distinguished document with respect to the set of documents; identifying, in the computer system, the key words within the distinguished document having the highest ones of the inverse document frequencies; for each of the identified key words, conducting, in the computer system, a search for at least a subset of the documents containing at least one of the identified key words; generating, in the computer system, a score associated with each of the at least a subset of the documents, the score calculated by summing the inverse document frequency of each identified key word contained within each of the at least a subset of the documents; ranking, in the computer system, the at least a subset of the documents of the set based at least upon the score.