System and method for generating an online summary of a collection of documents

• US 8,037,053 B2
• Filed: 10/31/2008
• Issued: 10/11/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 10/31/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Li, Xin, Zhao, Eric
• Primary Examiner(s): Vy; Hung T
• Application Number:
  US12/263,368
• Publication Number:
  US 20100114859A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,075 Days
• Field of Search: 707/705, 707/706, 707/722, 707/758, 707/709, 704/10
• US Class Current: 707/709
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/338 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/345 Summarisation for human users

Abstract

An improved system and method for generating an online summary of a collection of documents is provided. A list of documents may be received, and the titles of the list of documents may be obtained. A set of terms that frequently occur in the titles of the documents may be iteratively expanded and overlapping phrases may be merged until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold. In an embodiment, an article summarizer operably coupled to a search engine may be provided to generate a summary of a list of references to web pages in search results using titles of the web pages. The summary of the web pages may then be sent with the list of references to the web pages as search results to a client device for display to a user.

Claims

1. A computer system for generating an online summary of documents, comprising:

a central processing unit configured to process information as;

a search engine that receives a search query and obtains a list of URLs of web pages as search results;

an article summarizer operably coupled to the search engine to generate an online summary of the list of URLs of web pages using a plurality of titles of the web pages;

a web page storage operably coupled to the article summarizer that stores the online summary and the list of URLs of web pages as search results;

merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold; and

applying grammar rules for a language in which the information is expressly merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold used to remove a term at the beginning or end of a phrase that should not appear in that position of a sentence in the given language.

2. The system of claim 1 further comprising a web browser operably coupled to the search engine to display the online summary and the list of URLs of web pages.

3. A computer-implemented method for generating an online summary of documents, comprising:

using a central processing unit configured to process information for;

receiving a search query to obtain a list of URLs of web pages as search results;

obtaining the list of URLs;

using an article summarizer generating an online summary of the list of the URLs using a plurality of titles of the web pages;

using a web page storage operably coupled to the article summarizer for storing the online summary and the list of URLs of web pages as search results;

merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold; and

applying grammar rules for a language in which the information is expressly merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold used to remove a term at the beginning or end of a phrase that should not appear in that position of a sentence in the given language.

4. The method of claim 3 further comprising adding the online summary to the list of the URLs as search results.

5. The method of claim 3 wherein generating the online summary using the plurality of titles of the web pages comprises obtaining each of the plurality of titles of the web pages from a field in a hypertext markup language file.

6. The method of claim 3 wherein generating the online summary using the plurality of titles of the web pages comprises choosing a plurality of terms from the plurality of titles of the web pages.

7. The method of claim 6 wherein choosing the plurality of terms from the plurality of titles of the web pages comprises choosing at least one term that occurs with a frequency greater than a defined threshold in the plurality of titles of the web pages.

8. The method of claim 6 further comprising adding to the plurality of terms at least one term from the plurality of titles of the web pages.

9. The method of claim 8 wherein adding to the plurality of terms the at least one term from the plurality of titles of the web pages comprises adding to the plurality of terms at least one term that is adjacent in the plurality of titles of the web pages to a term in the plurality of terms.

10. The method of claim 6 further comprising merging one overlapping phrase in the plurality of terms from the plurality of titles of the web pages until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein merging the at least one overlapping phrase in the plurality of terms from the plurality of titles of the web pages comprises determining the frequency of the position of the occurrence of the phrase in the plurality of titles of the web pages.

12. The method of claim 11 further comprising removing at least one overlapping phrase without a highest frequency of the position of the occurrence of the phrase in the plurality of titles of the web pages.

13. The method of claim 10 further comprising determining whether there are any terms not in the plurality of terms that occur in the plurality of titles of the web pages with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold.

14. The method of claim 13 further comprising adding at least one adjacent term in the plurality of titles of web pages that occurs with a frequency that exceeds the predefined threshold to the plurality of terms.

15. The method of claim 14 further comprising merging at least one overlapping phrase in the plurality of terms from the plurality of titles of the web pages.

16. The method of claim 13 further comprising applying a plurality of grammar rules to the plurality of terms and removing at least one term from the plurality of terms.

17. A computer program product comprising computer executable instructions for generating a summary of documents, said instructions causing a computer to perform:

receiving a search query;

obtaining a list of URLs of web pages as search results;

generating an online summary of the list of URLs of web pages using a plurality of titles of the web pages;

storing the online summary and the list of URLs of web pages as search results;

merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold; and

applying grammar rules for a language in which the information is expressly merging overlapping phrases until there may be no more terms that occur in the titles with a frequency that exceeds a predefined threshold used to remove a term at the beginning or end of a phrase that should not appear in that position of a sentence in the given language.

18. The computer program product of claim 17 wherein generating the online summary using the plurality of titles comprises choosing a plurality of terms from the list of URLs.

19. The computer program product of claim 18 further comprising:

adding at least one adjacent term in the plurality of titles of the list of URLs that occurs with a frequency that exceeds the predefined threshold to the plurality of terms;

and removing at least one overlapping phrase in the plurality of terms.