Processing an electronic document for information extraction

• US 20050125746A1
• Filed: 08/02/2004
• Published: 06/09/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 12/04/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Viola, Paul, Rinker, James, Law, Hiu Chung
• Granted Patent: US 7,251,644 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/853
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99936 Pattern matching access

Abstract

The present invention relates to a method of automatically processing an electronic document for routing over a computer network. The method includes recognizing text in the document to identify a candidate address, accessing a collection of potential destinations and comparing the candidate address to the collection of potential destinations to determine a destination for the document.

Claims

1. A method of automatically processing an electronic document for routing over a computer network, comprising:

recognizing text in the document to identify a candidate address;

accessing a collection of potential destinations; and

comparing the candidate address to the collection of potential destinations to determine a destination for the document.

2. The method of claim 1 and further comprising:

identifying features associated with the candidate addresses.

3. The method of claim 2 and further comprising:

assigning a score to the candidate address based on the features of the candidate address.

4. The method of claim 2 wherein the features relate to at least one of a location of the candidate address, a distance from the candidate address to a selected word and text of the candidate address.

5. The method of claim 1 and further comprising:

computing a value indicative of a difference between the candidate address and at least one potential destination.

6. The method of claim 5 wherein the value is computed based on the difference between a word in the candidate address and a word associated with the at least one potential destination.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the candidate address comprises contiguous words in the document.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein the collection of potential destinations is stored in a database with associated fields including at least a first name, a last name and an email address of a recipient.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein the document is a fax.

10. A computer readable medium having instructions that, when implemented on a computer, cause the computer to process a document for routing to a selected address, the instructions comprising:

a recognition module adapted to recognize text within the document;

an identification module adapted to identify features of the text within the document; and

a comparison module adapted to compare the text to a collection of addresses and determine a recipient based on the text and the features.

11. The computer readable medium of claim 10 wherein the recognition module is adapted to perform optical character recognition.

12. The computer readable medium of claim 10 wherein the recognition module is further adapted to recognize words in the text and the identification module is adapted to assign a relevance score to each word based on the features of the text, wherein the relevance score is an indication of the word being associated with the recipient.

13. The computer readable medium of claim 12 wherein the identification module is further adapted to select relevant word candidates based on the relevance score.

14. The computer readable medium of claim 13 wherein the comparison module is further adapted to compare the relevant word candidates to words associated with the collection of addresses.

15. The computer readable medium of claim 14 wherein the words associated with the collection of addresses correspond to at least one of a first name, a last name and an email address.

16. The computer readable medium of claim 10 wherein the features relate to at least one of a location of a word in the text, a distance from a word in the text to a nearby word in the text and text of a word.

17. The computer readable medium of claim 10 wherein the instructions further comprise a routing module adapted to route the document to the recipient.