Facility for highlighting documents accessed through search or browsing

• US 20060041530A1
• Filed: 10/21/2005
• Published: 02/23/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 05/25/2000
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Milic-Frayling, Natasa, Sommerer, Ralph
• Application Number:
  US11/255,512
• Publication Number:
  US 20060041530A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99943 Generating database or data structure, e.g. via user interface

Abstract

An information highlighting facility assists the user in evaluating relevance of accessed documents to the user'"'"'s information need. The accessed documents may, for example, be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. When accessing documents identified as relevant by a search engine from other networked computers, the facility provides information highlighting to assist the user in determining whether the document is relevant. A model of the user'"'"'s interest, which may include an augmented set of search terms, is used to take into account the general interest of the user as captured by an interest profile and context of use of the computer by the user, or a combination thereof. The model of the user'"'"'s interest is applied to the document text as the document is accessed from its source. The highlighting of information about the document content may include highlighting of the terminology in the text, scrolling of the document to the relevant passages, identification of entity names and entity relations, creation of a document summary and a document thumbnail, etc. In addition, the model can be applied to a set of documents accessed by the user, e.g., to re-rank the top scoring documents from the result set provided to the user by a search engine or some other information providing services.

Claims

1. A computer implemented method of displaying documents accessed in a search or browsing mode, the method comprising:

creating a model of a user'"'"'s interest;

accessing documents from a source of such documents;

applying the model of the user'"'"'s interest to the retrieved documents; and

generating information regarding the relevancy of the retrieved documents.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the model comprises a query which is enhanced based on linguistic analysis.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein the linguistic analysis comprises syntactic and semantic analysis.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the model comprises a query which is enhanced based on a general interest profile.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the general interest profile is applied equally to documents accessed by the user in both search and browsing modes.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the model of user interest is based at least partially on the user task.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the information is used to highlight relevant portions of text in the retrieved documents.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the model comprises a query which is enhanced independently of and during the execution of the query by the search engine.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the model comprises a query which is applied to the accessed documents to assess relevance during retrieval of documents from their sources.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein documents are retrieved while a user that generated a query may be performing other tasks.

11. A computer readable medium having instructions stored thereon that causes a computer to perform the method of claim 1.