Patent ID: 7668813

Claim:
A future retrieval system operable to enable searching for future events associated with a set of documents, comprising: at least one memory device configured to store a database which includes the documents; and at least one computing device configured to: identify one or more future events associated with each of the documents, at least some of the documents having a plurality of the future events associated therewith; generate temporal data and a confidence value for each future event, the temporal data for each future event comprising a time segment, the confidence value representing a likelihood of occurrence for the corresponding future event and being determined with reference to text associated with the corresponding future event by identifying one or both of a verb tense or verb mood for the associated text, each future event corresponding to a tuple of the corresponding time segment and confidence value; identify a text scope for at least some of the future events, the text scope corresponding to a subset of the document with which the corresponding future event is associated; evaluate the text associated with the future events to generate event metadata for each future event; index the subsets of the documents corresponding to each future event with the corresponding event metadata, and the corresponding tuple of the corresponding time segment and confidence value in the database; and generate search results corresponding to selected ones of the documents in the database in response to queries which include references to future times, and to rank the search results in accordance with the confidence values associated with the future events associated with the selected documents.