Information handling mechanism

• US 20060106790A1
• Filed: 11/17/2005
• Published: 05/18/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 11/17/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Verint Systems UK Limited (Verint Systems Incorporated)
• Original Assignee: Transversal Corp. Ltd. (Verint Systems Incorporated)
• Inventors: Ryland, David Paul Austen
• Granted Patent: US 7,308,444 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/334 Query execution G06F16/335 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/335 Filtering based on additional data, e.g. user or group profiles filtering in web context G06F16/9535, G06F16/9536
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching

Abstract

Conventional electronic information retrieval systems using specialist databases assume that the database being searched is appropriate to the search being conducted.

The invention solves the problem that the above assumption may be incorrect. It does this by providing mechanisms (4, 4A and 4B) for identifying concepts respectively in: the search input question, a specialist database and a non-specialist database.

A comparator 8 and associated mechanisms are able to analyze how the specialist database differs from the non-specialist database and to use this information to derive an indication of the ability of the specialist database to answer the input question. This indication can be fed to the user via interface 1 or in an alternative arrangement could be used to block inappropriate information.

Claims

1. An information handling mechanism comprising

a) means for receiving an input;

b) a specialist database containing information relevant to a specialist subject;

c) means for generating concept models indicating occurrences of concepts in the specialist database and in a less specialist database;

d) means for identifying concepts in the input; and

e) means for calculating the relative probability that the identified concepts could have been generated by each concept model.

2. An information handling mechanism according to claim 1 in which the concept model includes a frequency distribution.

3. An information handling mechanism according to claim 1 in which the concept model includes information about the relationship between concepts in a passage of information.

4. An information handling mechanism according to claim 1 in which the concept model includes information about the adjacency of concepts.

5. An information handling mechanism according to claim 1 including means for using the output of the “

means for calculating”

to give a user an indication of confidence in the ability of the specialist database to answer a question applied to the input.

6. An information handling mechanism according to claim 5 including means for using the output of the “

means for calculating”

to block the input.

7. An information handling mechanism according to claim 6 in which the specialist database has divisions and the output of the “

means for calculating”

is arranged to perform a switching operation between divisions.

8. An information handling mechanism according to claim 7 comprising means for applying a query to any information retrieval engine to produce a number of answers in order of relevance;

means for feeding those answers into the specialist database incrementally so as to give a series of outputs from the “

means for calculating”

for different combinations of answers loaded into the database; and

means for selecting a combination which gives the optimum output value from the “

means for calculating.”

9. An information handling mechanism according to claim 8 in which:

the “

specialist database”

is a selected website,

the input is an advertisement or text describing it;

and including means for using the output of the “

means for calculating”

to control the application of the advertisement to the selected website.

10. An information handling mechanism according to claim 9 in which the “

less specialist database”

is the World Wide Web or a part of it.