Information retrieval

• US 20040167889A1
• Filed: 02/02/2004
• Published: 08/26/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 05/02/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Lau, Raymond, Chang, Jane Wen, McCandless, Michael Kyle
• Granted Patent: US 7,376,641 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/3
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2228 Indexing structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/31 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/954 Relational
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/956 Hierarchical
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99932 Access augmentation or optimizing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99936 Pattern matching access

Abstract

A method of accessing information from a collection of data includes receiving a query, generating an inverse index of the collection of data and generating results to the query in conjunction with the inverse index.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of accessing information from a collection of data comprising:

receiving a query;

generating an inverse index of the collection of data; and

generating results to the query in conjunction with the inverse index.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 wherein generating the inverse index comprises:

storing a canonical non-terminal representation of the data in the inverse index.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2 wherein generating the inverse index further comprises:

storing hierarchical information generated from the collection of data;

applying a parser and grammar rules to the collection of data to produce a canonical non-terminal representation of the data.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3 wherein the generating results comprises:

applying the parser and the grammar rules to the query to produce a query canonical form; and

matching the query canonical form to the canonical non-terminal representation of the data in the inverse index.

5. A computer program, residing on a computer-readable medium, comprising instructions for causing a computer to:

receive a query;

generate an inverse index of a collection of data; and

generate results to the query in conjunction with the inverse index.

6. The computer program of claim 5 further comprising instructions for causing the computer to:

store hierarchical information generated from the data in the inverse index; and

apply a parser and grammar rules to the data to produce canonical non-terminal representations of the data in the inverse index.

7. The computer program of claim 6 further comprising instructions for causing the computer to:

apply the parser and grammar rules to the query to generate a query canonical form; and

match the query canonical form to the non-terminal representation of the data in the inverse index.