Patent Document ID: 9058376
Application ID: 13839070

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method for assigning relevance scores to message elements, the method comprising: providing a structured collection of message elements stored in a data repository, the collection of message elements comprising: a plurality of messages elements, wherein each message element comprises a message content and metadata, the metadata including an author identity and a timestamp, and a plurality of oriented child-parent links each connecting a message element to an older message element called parent message element, so that each message element within the plurality of message elements is connected by a child-parent link to a parent message element within the plurality of message elements, parsing the message contents of the plurality of message elements to generate appreciative phrase marks assigned to the message elements, wherein an appreciative phrase mark is generated in response to detecting that the parsed message content of a later message element comprises a string of characters that matches an entry within a predefined dictionary of regard-expressing phrases and wherein the appreciative phrase mark is assigned to an earlier message element that is connected to the later message element by a sequence of one or more child-parent links, wherein the author identity of the later message element is different from the author identity of the earlier message element, parsing the metadata of the plurality of message elements to detect regard indicators assigned to the message elements, wherein a regard indicator assigned to a message element results from an action performed by a reader of the message element, wherein the regard indicators include the appreciative phrase marks, and computing relevance scores of the message elements as a function of the regard indicators assigned to the message elements; and generating a graph of authors comprising a collection of author nodes corresponding to the author identities comprised in the plurality of message elements and a collection of oriented regard links each associated to a respective appreciative phrase mark, wherein a regard link associated to an appreciative phrase mark originates from an author node corresponding to the author identity of the later message element comprising the regard-expressing phrase and points to an author node corresponding to the author identity of the earlier message element to which the appreciative phrase mark is assigned, and applying a link-based rank computation method to the graph of authors to determine link-based ranks of the author nodes, wherein the relevance score of a message element is computed as a function of the link-based rank of the author node corresponding to the author identity of the message element.

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Claim 7:
7. The method in accordance with claim 1 , further comprising parsing the message contents of the plurality of message elements to generate citation marks assigned to the message elements, wherein a citation mark is generated in response to detecting that the message content of a later message element comprises the message content of an earlier message element that is connected to the later message element by a sequence of one or more child-parent links, and wherein the method comprises assigning the citation mark to the earlier message element, wherein the regard indicators include the citation marks.