Patent ID: 7730061

Claim:
A method for generating an ordered list of signature terms occurring in at least a first document and a second document, comprising: computing a frequency of a first term occurring in a first document; computing a frequency of a second term occurring in the first document; sorting the first term and the second term to identify the most frequently occurring term in the first document selected from the group comprising the first term and the second term; computing a frequency of a third term occurring in a second document; computing a frequency of a fourth term occurring in the second document; sorting the third term and the fourth term to identify the most frequently occurring term in the second document selected from the group comprising the third term and the fourth term; truncating the sorted list for the first document by selecting a number of terms to retain from the sorted list for the first documents wherein the sorted list for the first document includes a plurality of terms; truncating the sorted list for the second document by selecting a number of terms to retain from the sorted list for the second documents wherein the sorted list for the second document includes a plurality of terms; reducing the size of at least one of the sorted list for the first document and the sorted list for the second document by utilizing a thesaurus to identify like terms; combining the sorted list for the first document and the sorted list for the second document utilizing a union operation; sorting the combined list generated by the union operation to create an ordered list of signature terms; receiving a signature term request, wherein the signature term request includes a number of top signature terms from the ordered list to be returned; and returning a number of top signature terms from the ordered list upon receipt of the signature term request.