Assisted form filling

• US 20050198563A1
• Filed: 03/03/2004
• Published: 09/08/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 03/03/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Zhigu Holdings Limited
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Kristjansson, Trausti T.
• Granted Patent: US 7,426,496 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/174 Form filling; Merging

Abstract

Systems and methods are described that facilitate assisting a user in filling forms. The invention can parse untagged media, such as email, etc., to identify elements that can be employed to populate a form. Identified elements can be automatically inserted into corresponding fields in a form, and status indicators can be associated therewith and indicated to a user in order to alert the user that review of a particular field in the form is warranted. Additionally, the untagged media and the form can be concurrently presented to the user to facilitate user supervision and/or interaction during assisted form filling.

Claims

1. A system that facilitates assisted form filling, comprising:

a control component that receives untagged textual input information;

a parsing component that populates a subset of a form based, at least in part, upon the untagged textual information; and

a display component that displays the untagged textual information and the populated form.

2. The system of claim 1, the parsing component comprises an artificial intelligence (AI) component that makes inferences regarding populating the form based at least in part on the untagged textual information.

3. The system of claim 2, the AI component employs hidden Markov models (HMMs) to determine a proper field in the form into which parsed textual information can be entered.

4. The system of claim 1, the display component employs color to indicate compatibility between at least one parsed untagged textual element and at least on field in the form.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising at least one status indicator that indicates a status level associated with at least one populated field in the form.

6. The system of claim 5, the at least one status indicator is colored according to a color code that indicates the status level of the at least one populated field in the form.

7. A method for assisted form filling comprising:

receiving untagged media;

parsing the untagged media to identify elements;

automatically populating a form with identified elements; and

displaying the untagged media and the populated form to a user.

8. The method of claim 7, further comprising employing color to indicate that an identified element is compatible with a particular field in the form.

9. The method of claim 7, further comprising employing at least one hidden Markov model (HMM) to determine an appropriate field into which an identified element can be entered.

10. The method of claim 7, further comprising indicating a status level associated at least one element in at least one field.

15. The method of claim 7, further comprising storing the populated form to a data store if confidence levels of all elements in all fields are above a desired confidence threshold.

11. The method of claim 11, further comprising prompting the user to verify and/or correct at least one element in at least one field if the status level associated with the at least one element in the at least one field is below a desired level.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising updating the populated form according to user verification and/or correction of the at least one element in the at least one field.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising upgrading the status level associated with the at least one element based, at least in part, on user verification and/or correction of the at least one element.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising employing different colors to indicate different levels of status.

16. A method for assisting a user to populate a form, comprising:

reading untagged media into an untagged media store;

reading side information into a side information store;

parsing untagged media to identify elements for populating a form;

writing identified elements to a form data store; and

displaying identified elements in fields of a form graphical user interface.

17. The method of claim 16, further comprising displaying the untagged media with visual indicators in an untagged media graphical user interface.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein the visual indicators are colors indicating compatibility of at least one identified element with at least one field in the form.

19. The method of claim 16, further comprising indicating a confidence level associated with the element populating a given field.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein different status levels are indicated by different colors.

21. The method of claim 19, further comprising allowing a user to correct at least one field in the form if the field contains at least one error.

22. The method of claim 21, further comprising adding information gleaned from correction of the at least one field in the form to the side information store.

23. The method of claim 22, further comprising re-parsing the untagged media after addition of information gleaned from the correction of the at least one field to propagate the correction of the at least one field to at least one other field.

24. The method of claim 16, further comprising permitting a user to verify that at least one element in at least one field is correct.

25. The method of claim 24, further comprising adding information gleaned from verification of the at least one field in the form to the side information store.

26. The method of claim 25, further comprising re-parsing the untagged media after addition of information gleaned from the verification of the at least one field to propagate the correction of the at least one field to at least one other field.

27. The method of claim 16, further comprising writing the contents of the form data store to a file if no errors are present in the form.

28. A system for reducing errors and time required in form filling, comprising:

means for receiving untagged media input;

means for parsing untagged media;

means for populating a form with parsed untagged media; and

means for concurrently displaying untagged media and the populated form.

29. The system of claim 28, further comprising means for indicating a status level associated with at least one field in the populated form.

30. The system of claim 28, further comprising means for correcting and/or verifying at least one field in the populated form.

31. The system of claim 28, further comprising means for indicating compatibility between parsed untagged media elements and fields in the form.

32. A computer readable medium that has computer executable instructions stored thereon to:

receive untagged media;

parse untagged media to identify elements

populate fields in a form with identified elements;

indicate a status associated with populated fields in the form; and

permit correction and/or verification of elements in fields in the populated form.