Patent ID: 7472121

Claim:
A method of comparing a plurality of documents, said method comprising: determining a plurality of similarity measures for said plurality of documents; and determining an overall similarity measure for said plurality of documents, based on said plurality of similarity measures, wherein said plurality of similarity measures are chosen from the group of similarity measures comprising: a semantic similarity measures based on similarity of terms contained in said plurality of documents; a structural similarity measure based on the structures of chemical terms described in said plurality of documents; and a reference similarity measure based on references contained in said plurality of documents; wherein said plurality of similarity measures include a semantic similarity measure and a reference similarity measure, and further wherein two documents P i and P j being compared are represented by corresponding vectors: d i ={w i1 , w i2 , . . . , w in }, where w ik (1<k<n) is a non-negative value denoting the weight of the term k in the document i, and dj={wj 1 , wj 2 , . . . , wj n }, where w il (1<l<n) is a non-negative value denoting the weight of the term l in the document j, and the semantic similarity measure SemSim( ) is given by the equation: SemSim ⁡ ( P i , P j ) = d i , d j d i · d i ⁢ d j · d j , in which where d i ·dj is the dot product between the vectors, calculated as Σ(from k=0 to n)Σ(from 1=0 to n) w ik ·w il ; and wherein if terms k and l belong to ontology classes Ck and Cl, respectively, w ik ·w il is calculated as: tf ik ×tf jl ×idf(Ck)×idf(Cl)×sim(Ck, Cl)×WT ont , wherein tf ik is the frequency of the term k in the document i, tf jl is the frequency of the term l in the document j, idf(Ck) represents the inverse document frequency of class Ck in document corpus of document i and is calculated as: log 2 (N/n Ck ), where N is the number of documents in a collection, and n Ck is the number of documents in which a term of class Ck occurs at least once, idf(Cl) represents the inverse document frequency of class Cl in document corpus of document j and is calculated as: log 2 (N/n Cl ) , where N is the number of documents in a collection, and n Cl is the number of documents in which a term of class Cl occurs at least once, sim(Ck, Cl) is calculated as: sim ⁡ ( Ck , Cl ) = 2 × [ ln ⁡ ( p min ) ] ln ⁡ ( p Ck ) + ln ⁡ ( p Cl ) , where p Ck is the probability of encountering the class Ck or a child of the term in a given taxonomy, p Cl is the probability of encountering the class Cl or a child of the term in a given taxonomy and p min is the minimum probability among common ancestors of classes Ck and Cl, and WT ont is a predefined constant in the range 0<WT ont <1.