Facility for highlighting documents accessed through search or browsing

• US 20060047651A1
• Filed: 10/21/2005
• Published: 03/02/2006
• 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:
  US11/256,062
• Publication Number:
  US 20060047651A1
• 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 method of assessing relevance of documents, the method comprising:

creating a user interest model;

analyzing documents accessed independent from a search engine; and

applying the user interest model to such documents.

2. The method of claim 1 and further comprising highlighting relevant portions of the documents based on the application of the user interest model to such documents.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the user interest model is applied to documents accessed from independent search results, or in a browsing mode.

4. The method of claim 1 and further comprising enhancing relevant portions of accessed documents for use by a user.

5. The method of claim 4 wherein the enhancing of relevant documents is selected from the group consisting of document highlighting, document scrolling, document thumbnails, document re-ranking, hyperlink relevance assessment, entity extraction, entity relation finding, and document summarization.

6. The method of claim 4 wherein the enhancing of relevant documents is performed as documents are downloaded.

7. The method of claim 6 wherein the enhancing of relevant documents is selected from the group consisting of highlighting all occurrences of query/interest profile terms, scrolling to the first occurrence of important concepts, scrolling to paragraphs with higher density of query/interest profile terms, providing thumbnails highlighting all terms occurrences, and providing thumbnails highlighting paragraphs or portion of the text with various densities of query/interest profile terms.

8. The method of claim 4 wherein the enhancing of relevant documents is performed while documents are downloaded as a background task.

9. The method of claim 6 wherein the enhancing of relevant documents is selected from the group consisting of selective highlighting of occurrences of query/interest profile terms, scrolling to the most relevant passages in the document, providing thumbnails highlighting or relevant passages, document re-ranking/hyperlink relevance assessment based on relevance scoring, entity extraction and entity relation finding, extraction of sentences containing context terms, and generating summaries that contain information from both a context and the document.

10. The method of claim 4 wherein the enhancements are based on a shallow document text analysis or on a deep linguistic and statistical analysis of the document text.

11. The method of claim 1 wherein the user interest model is selected from the group consisting of an original user'"'"'s description of a query/interest profile, an augmented query/enhanced description of the interest profile, general interest profiles, and query/interest profile combined with information about the user'"'"'s task.

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

13. A method of assessing relevance of documents, the method comprising:

creating a user interest model;

analyzing documents accessed; and

applying the user interest model to such documents to highlight relevant portions of the documents based on the user interest model.