System and method for mining and tracking business documents

• US 20100042623A1
• Filed: 08/14/2008
• Published: 02/18/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 08/14/2008
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Corporation (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Torres, Valerie, Feng, Junlan
• Application Number:
  US12/228,551
• Publication Number:
  US 20100042623A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: N/A
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/35 Clustering; Classification
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2216/03 Data mining

Abstract

Systems and methods are described that mine and track archived business documents for discovering business knowledge and intelligence using data mining, machine learning, statistics, and computational linguistics, from different linguistic sources according to their meaning.

Claims

1. A method for mining and tracking documents comprising:

inputting a plurality of documents;

converting the documents into a common data format;

analyzing the structure and content of each document;

organizing the documents into a series;

mining each series for specific intelligence; and

comparing documents in a series to determine disparities in structure and content.

2. The method according to claim 1 wherein the inputted documents are in formats such as MS-word, pdf, HTML, and audio and video files.

3. The method according to claim 1 wherein the common data format is XML.

4. The method according to claim 1 wherein organizing the analyzed documents is in the form of document clustering.

5. The method according to claim 1 wherein a series further comprises a time series.

6. The method according to claim 1 wherein the structure and content differences include changes in the documents over time, the number of documents for a certain product in a given period, the hot topic in a given period of time, price changes in a bargaining process, common features of successful sales, and detecting templates between documents.

7. The method according to claim 3 further comprises cleaning-up HTML documents.

8. The method according to claim 7 further comprising:

parsing an HTML document into a Document Object Model (DOM) tree structure of the source code; and

laying out a rendered page.

9. The method according to claim 4 wherein document clustering clusters documents into categories according to document similarity.

10. The method according to claim 9 wherein document clustering is performed using machine learning and statistical learning techniques, and extracts features such as content features, structure features, and metadata features of a document.

11. A system for mining and tracking documents comprising:

means for inputting a plurality of documents;

means for converting the documents into a common data format;

means for analyzing the structure and content of each document;

means for organizing the documents into a series;

means for mining each series for specific intelligence; and

means for comparing documents in a series to determine disparities in structure and content.

12. The system according to claim 11 wherein the inputted documents are in formats such as MS-word, pdf, HTML, and audio and video files.

13. The system according to claim 11 wherein the common data format is XML.

14. The system according to claim 11 wherein means for organizing the analyzed documents is in the form of document clustering.

15. The system according to claim 11 wherein a series further comprises a time series.

16. The system according to claim 11 wherein the structure and content differences include changes in the documents over time, the number of documents for a certain product in a given period, the hot topic in a given period of time, price changes in a bargaining process, common features of successful sales, and detecting templates between documents.

17. The system according to claim 13 further comprises means for cleaning-up HTML documents.

18. The system according to claim 17 further comprising:

means for parsing an HTML document into a Document Object Model (DOM) tree structure of the source code; and

means for laying out a rendered page.

19. The system according to claim 14 wherein means for document clustering clusters documents into categories according to document similarity.

20. The system according to claim 19 wherein means for document clustering is performed using machine learning and statistical learning techniques, and extracts features such as content features, structure features, and metadata features of a document.