Patent Document ID: 7720792
Application ID: 11348303

Base Claim:
1. A computer-based method for automatically compensating for stop words contained in documents during a query of the documents, the method comprising: (a) generating an abstract mathematical space based on documents included in a collection of documents, wherein each document has a vector representation in the abstract mathematical space; (b) receiving a user query; (c) generating a vector representation of the user query in the abstract mathematical space; (d) computing a similarity between the vector representation of the user query and the vector representation of each document, wherein computing a similarity between the vector representation of the user query and the vector representation of a first document in the collection of documents comprises applying a weighting function that compensates for stop words, wherein the weighting function is applied to only one component of the vector representation of the first document that is associated with the most frequently occurring word contained in the first document, thereby automatically compensating for a stop word contained in the first document, wherein computing the similarity between the vector representation of the user query and the vector representation of the first document comprises computing the following equation: 〈 d  ⁢ q 〉 = 1  d  ⁢ ⁢  q  ⁡ [ w ⁡ ( d 1 · q 1 ) + ∑ i = 2 k ⁢ ⁢ ⅆ i ⁢ · q i ] , wherein d is the vector representation of the first document, q is the vector representation of the user query, d|q is the similarity between the vector representation of the user query and the vector representation of the first document, w is the weighting function that compensates for stop words, and d 1 is the one component of the vector representation of the first document that is associated with the most frequently occurring word contained in the first document; and (e) displaying a result based on the similarity computations.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein applying the weighting function of step (d) comprises decreasing the one component of the vector representation of the first document by a factor of two.