Document relevance determining method and computer program

• US 9,223,854 B2
• Filed: 12/21/2009
• Issued: 12/29/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 10/14/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. (HP Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. (HP Inc.)
• Inventors: Dey, Prasenjit, Ramanathan, Krishnan, Madhvanath, Sriganesh, Chandra, Praphul
• Primary Examiner(s): PEACH, POLINA G
• Application Number:
  US12/642,876
• Publication Number:
  US 20110087659A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,199 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3334 Selection or weighting of terms from queries, including natural language queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/338 Presentation of query results

Abstract

Disclosed is a method and computer program product of determining the relevance of at least a part of an electronic document comprising a plurality of terms distributed over a plurality of regions of said document, comprising displaying the electronic document to a user; determining the gaze characteristics of the person on a region of the electronic document; assigning a relevance score to an individual term in said region based on said characteristics; and generating a term relevance label for said electronic document, said term relevance label comprising relevance scores for the respective individual terms in said document The relevance scores may also be used to define a user profile for the user that can aid in retrieving future documents of relevance to the user.

Claims

1. A method of retrieving at least one electronic document from a database comprising a plurality of electronic documents ranked, the method comprising:

displaying the electronic document to a user;

determining the gaze characteristics of the person on a region of the electronic document;

assigning a relevance score to an individual term in said region based on said characteristics; and

generating a term relevance label for said electronic document, said term relevance label comprising relevance scores for the respective individual terms in said document;

receiving a user-defined search query including at least one individual term;

accessing the electronic database;

accessing the term relevance label of the respective electronic documents

to retrieve the respective relevance scores of the at least one individual term in the search query for said documents,

selecting the electronic documents from said electronic database for which the relevance score of the at least one individual term in the search query meets a predefined criterion; and

displaying said selection of electronic documents to the user.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the database comprises the Internet.