Patent ID: 7269598

Claim:
A multi-language information retrieval method for retrieving information from a plurality of target documents using at least one reference document, the target documents and at least one reference document stored as electronic information files in a computer system, comprising: generating a term-document matrix to represent the electronic information files, each element in the term-document matrix indicating a measure of a number of occurrences of a term within a respective one of the electronic information files, the term-document matrix including a first partition of entries that represent a first version of the at least one reference document comprising content in a first natural language and a second version of the at least one reference document comprising content in a second natural language such that the first and second versions of the reference document can be used to semantically link documents between the first and second natural languages, the term-document matrix including a second partition of entries that represent the target documents, the target documents comprising content in the first natural language or the second natural language; generating a term-spread matrix that is a weighted autocorrelation of the generated term-document matrix, the term-spread matrix indicating an amount of variation in term usage in the information files and an extent to which terms are correlated; receiving a query consisting of at least one term; in response to receiving the query, generating a query vector having as many elements as rows of the generated term-spread matrix; formulating, based upon the generated term-spread matrix and query vector, a constrained optimization problem description for determining a degree of correlation between the query vector and the target documents, wherein the choice of a stabilization parameter determines the extent of a trade-off between a degree of fit and stability of all solutions to the constrained optimization problem description; determining a solution vector to the constrained optimization problem description, the vector including a plurality of document weights, each weight corresponding to one of the target documents and reflecting a degree of correlation between the query and the corresponding target document; and providing a response to the received query that reflects the document weights.