Iterative technique for phrase query formation and an information retrieval...
Inventors:
Pedersen, Jan O.; Halvorsen, Per-Kristian; Cutting, Douglass R.; Tukey, John W.; Bier, Eric A.; and Bobrow, Daniel G.
View document:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5278980A
Abstract
An information retrieval system and method are provided in which an operator inputs one or more query words which are used to determine a search key for searching through a corpus of documents, and which returns any matches between the search key and the corpus of documents as a phrase containing the word data matching the query word(s), a non-stop (content) word next adjacent to the matching word data, and all intervening stop-words between the matching word data and the next adjacent non-stop word. The operator, after reviewing one or more of the returned phrases can then use one or more of the next adjacent non-stop-words as new query words to reformulate the search key and perform a subsequent search through the document corpus. This process can be conducted iteratively, until the appropriate documents of interest are located. The additional non-stop-words from each phrase are preferably aligned with each other (e.g., by columnation) to ease viewing of the “new” content words.
Application Number: US07/745,794
Filing Date: 1991-08-16
Patent Number: US5278980A