Method and system for assessing relevant properties of work contexts for use by information services

• US 20060277168A1
• Filed: 05/23/2006
• Published: 12/07/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 07/30/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Northwestern University
• Original Assignee: Northwestern University
• Inventors: Hammond, Kristian, Birnbaum, Lawrence, Budzik, Jerome
• Granted Patent: US 7,933,906 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24578 using ranking
• 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: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

An information retrieval system for automatically retrieving information related to the context of an active task being manipulated by a user. The system observes the operation of the active task and user interactions, and utilizes predetermined criteria to generate context representation of the active task that are relevant to the context of the active task. The information retrieval system then processes the context representation to generate queries or search terms for conducting an information search. The information retrieval system determines the relevance of a word to the context by utilizing an adaptive weighting system. The information retrieval system assigns varying weights to different attributes of a word and calculates an accumulated weight of the word by accumulating all weights assigned to the word. The attributes may include word size, style, location of the word, etc. The system then ranks the importance of words based on their respective accumulated weight, and chooses words that rank within a predetermined number from the top to form search terms to conduct an information search using various data sources.

Claims

1-21. -21. (canceled)

22. A method for determining an emphasis status of a text item comprising the steps of:

accessing information related to an attribute value of each of a plurality of text items;

generating a representative attribute value of the plurality of text items based on the attribute value of each of the plurality of text item;

accessing information related to the attribute value of the text item;

comparing the attribute value of the text item with the representative attribute value of the plurality of text items; and

determining the emphasis status of the text item based on a result of the comparing step.

23. The method of claim 22, wherein the attribute value is selected from the group consisting of font size and line height.

24. The method of claim 22, wherein the text item is considered as emphasized in response to the attribute value of the text item being larger than the representative attribute value.

25-29. -29. (canceled)