Patent ID: 7587381

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: analyzing a document to identify elements within the document, wherein elements are words or phrases that explicitly appear in the document; assigning an element score to each of one or more of the elements, the element score indicating the element's significance to topical content of the document; generating a matrix of element-pairs from the elements identified within the document, and for one or more of the element-pairs, calculating an element-pair score indicating the element-pair's significance to topical content of the document; and generating a sentence set for one or more elements identified within the document, the sentence set comprising ordinal values indicating sentences in which the elements occur, wherein said calculating an element-pair score indicating the element-pair's significance to topical content of the document includes weighting the element-pair score based, in part, on a measure of a shortest distance between occurrences of the elements of the element-pair, as indicated by the sentence sets associated with each element-pair, whereby the sentence set is stored in memory and used by information retrieval systems, whereby element-pair scores are stored as a data structure and executable by information retrieval systems.