Canonicalization of terms in a keyword-based presentation system

• US 7,007,014 B2
• Filed: 11/07/2003
• Issued: 02/28/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 04/04/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Liu, Hongche, Raj, Ravi Narasimhan
• Primary Examiner(s): Wong, Leslie
• Application Number:
  US10/703,688
• Publication Number:
  US 20040199496A1
• Time in Patent Office: 844 Days
• Field of Search: 707 3- 5, 707/10, 707/14, 705/15, 705/26, 705/27, 715/513, 715/520
• US Class Current: 707/758
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0641 Shopping interfaces
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/12 Hotels or restaurants
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing

Abstract

A presentation system accepts presentations or references to presentations from prospective presenters, some or all of which are stored in a database and referenced by keywords such that presentations to be presented in response to particular searches can be identified. A presentation manager handles accepting bids and settling terms between prospective presenters. The results of such processes might be stored in a presentation details database and a presentation server handles retrieving presentations from there for presentation to users along with requests. Both the presentation manager and the presentation server can operate on a keywords-basis, wherein presentation terms specify keywords to be associated with particular presentations and the presentation server serves particular presentations based on keywords in a search query for which the presentations are to be returned. The association of keywords can be done using canonicalization so that, under certain conditions, different keywords are treated as the same keyword.

Claims

1. Using a computer system with access to electronically retrievable content in digital form, a method of determining presentations from a set of presentations to present alongside search results, the method comprising:

receiving a request from a user in the form of a search query string;

canonicalizing one or more terms in the search query string to form a reformed search query string when the one or more terms meet canonicalization criteria;

applying the reformed search query string as an input to a presentation processor;

selecting, using the presentation processor, presenting from the set of presentations to be included in the response to the request,

wherein selection of presentations from the set of presentations is done according to at least keywords associated with presentations in the set of presentations;

wherein at least one keyword is a canonicalization of at least one of the one or more terms meeting the canonicalization criteria; and

wherein mapping plural forms to canonical singular forms uses a dictionary generated by the steps of;

a) collect a set of nouns as the dictionary;

b) remove compound words from the dictionary;

c) use an inflection process to convert singular nouns from the set of nouns to plural nouns;

d) invert mapping of the inflection process to thereby converting plural nouns to singular nouns;

e) check for cyclic mappings, wherein the output of the inverted mapping step is compared to the singular nouns input to the inflection process;

f) flagging singular nouns that do not pass the cyclic mapping check;

g) remove nouns that do not have corresponding plurals in the set of nouns;

h) remove ambiguous plural forms that are mappable to multiple singular forms, such that at mot one of the multiple singular forms remains in the dictionary;

i) remove nouns that correspond to abbreviations; and

j) consolidate transitive mappings into single nontransitive mappings.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

k) mapping nouns to a preferred dialect; and

l) mapping nouns to one of multiple forms when a short form and a long form of a noun appear.