Patent ID: 7356187

Claim:
A method for modeling an information request, comprising: receiving unlabeled and labeled documents; extracting a set of features from each document; learning a model from example documents marked as positive or negative with respect to said request wherein said model scores documents to evaluate a degree of membership in a group responsive to said request; evaluating the performance of model settings on example documents; applying an adjustment algorithm that provides a threshold value Î¸ new ; applying a scoring function that computes a score, which is a value assigned to a document by the learnt model; and the document classifying based on the following equation: Class( X )=Sign(scoreâˆ’Î¸ new ) wherein Î¸ new is said threshold value, score is said value assigned to the document by the learnt model sign is a function that returns a sign value based upon a value of score minus Î¸ new , and Class(X) is a classification of the document assigned by the Sign function.