Patent ID: 8473477

Claim:
In a computerized search system in which queries are submitted by users who receive, in response, a list of documents selected from a corpus of documents wherein the list comprises documents deemed responsive to a user's query, a method of determining relevance of the documents comprising: obtaining the query from the user; determining a distribution of nodes of a taxonomy that have non zero probabilities of containing documents relevant to the query; determining a probability that a document matching the query resides in a particular node; determining a relevance of documents to the query by multiplying a particular node probability from the distribution of nodes by the probability that a document matching the query resides in the particular node; for each particular node containing a particular document, determining a value of the relevance of the particular document to the query by multiplying a determined relevance of the particular document matching the query by the initial probability that the particular node includes relevant documents; generating updated probabilities that the distribution of nodes of the taxonomy contain relevant documents by multiplying individual ones of the relevance of documents to the query by a weighting factor, wherein the weighting factors used to generate the updated probabilities decay monotonically with the relevance value of the documents to the query; generating an updated distribution of nodes by weighting each of the relevance of documents to the query; determining an updated relevance of documents to the query based on the updated distribution of nodes, updated probabilities, and the relevance of documents matching the query; and summing the updated relevance values to determine the relevance of the documents to the query.