Patent Document ID: 8103686
Application ID: 11954218
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for determining similar entities to a query element from a corpus of lists, comprising: storing a corpus of lists at a computing device configured to provide data responsive to search queries; determining a representation for each list in the corpus; determining similarity between lists in the corpus that contain common elements by comparing representations of the lists in the corpus; determining a score for each element in each list in the corpus that represents validity of each element in the corpus; determining, for each list in the corpus, an element weight for each element occurring in each list in the corpus, wherein: the element weight of each common element that occurs in different lists in the corpus is based on the similarity between the different lists in the corpus that contain the common element, and the element weight of each common element that occurs in different lists is greater in similar lists in the corpus than the element weight of the same common element in dissimilar lists in the corpus; determining a list weight for each list in the corpus using constituent element weights of the elements within each list; receiving a search query that includes the query element at the computing device; determining nearest neighbors of the query element by: selecting a predetermined number of top lists from a set of lists that contain the query element based on the list weight for each list in the set of lists that contain the query element, determining an element weight for each of the elements in the top lists, and selecting a predetermined number of top elements from the elements in the top lists as the nearest neighbors of the query element based on the element weight for each of the elements in the top lists; and providing data responsive to the search query comprising the nearest neighbors of the query element.