SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR GENERATING A RELATIONSHIP NETWORK

• US 20080162514A1
• Filed: 11/27/2007
• Published: 07/03/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 06/06/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Regents of the University of California (University of California)
• Original Assignee: Regents of the University of California (University of California)
• Inventors: Myers, Cornelia A., Podowski, Raf M., Franks, Kasian
• Granted Patent: US 7,987,191 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/100
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3347 using vector based model

Abstract

A computer-implemented system and process for generating a relationship network is disclosed. The system provides a set of data items to be related and generates variable length data vectors to represent the relationships between the terms within each data item. The system can be used to generate a relationship network for documents, images, or any other type of file. This relationship network can then be queried to discover the relationships between terms within the set of data items.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented process for generating a relationship network, comprising:

(a) providing a set of data items to be related, wherein said data items comprise a plurality of terms;

(b) selecting a first data item to be processed;

(c) applying a frame to said first data item, wherein said frame comprises a first set of terms within said data item;

(d) calculating data vectors for the terms within said frame;

(e) moving said frame to comprise a second set of terms within said data item;

(f) creating a relationship network by repeating steps (d)-(e) until data vectors for all of the terms in said data item have been calculated; and

(g) storing said relationship network to a storage.

2. The method of claim 1, comprising adding weight values to said data vectors for unique terms in said first data item.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein said weight values relate to the frequency of said terms in said first data item.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said data items comprise documents and said terms comprise words.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein said frame comprises at least three sentences in said data item.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising removing specific terms from said data items.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein said calculating comprises using a Fibonacci sequence in reverse to obtain a decay factor between terms in said frame.

8. A system for generating relationships between data items, comprising:

a storage comprising a set of data items to be related, wherein each data item comprises a plurality of terms;

a frame generator configured to generate a frame that selects a plurality of terms in said data items to associate; and

a vector generator configured to generate data vectors to represent the associations between the data items within said frame.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein the vector generator comprises instructions for assigning a distance measurement to each of said data items in said frame.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein said instructions use a Fibonacci decay calculation.

11. The system of claim 8, wherein said vector generator comprises instructions for modifying the data vectors based upon the frequency of the term within the frame divided by the frequency of the term in the entire set of documents.

12. The system of claim 8, further comprising instructions for removing stop-listed words from the documents.

13. The system of claim 8, further comprising instructions for treating terms comprising multiple-word phrases as single terms.

14. The system of claim 8, further comprising an input module for accepting a query term from a user and determining relationship vectors associated with said query term.

15. The system of claim 14, further comprising an extractor module comprising instructions for extracting all relationship vectors for said query term.

16. The system of claim 15, further comprising a list generator comprising instructions for generating a list of said relationship vectors according to a uniqueness score.

17. The system of claim 8, wherein said vector generator comprises instructions for calculating the distance between terms.