Method and apparatus for information access employing overlapping clusters

Claim 3

The method of claim 1, further including the step of defining an inner cluster associated with at least one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters, said inner cluster consisting of documents found only in the at least one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters.

Claim 4

The method of claim 2, further including the step of defining an intermediate cluster, associated with at least one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters, said intermediate cluster corresponding to a primary overlapping cluster and consisting of all documents, in the primary overlapping cluster, for which a corresponding attractor is the closest attractor.

Claim 5

The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of: displaying the summary of the plurality of overlapping clusters; allowing a user to select one of said primary overlapping clusters from the displayed summary; and in response to a user selection, preparing a further structuring of a corpus defined by the documents associated with the selected one of said primary overlapping clusters, said further structuring including a plurality of secondary clusters.

Claim 6

The method of claim 4, further comprising the step of iteratively repeating the steps of: displaying the summary of the plurality of clusters; allowing user selection of one of said plurality of clusters from the displayed summary; and preparing a further structuring of a corpus defined by the documents associated with the selected one of said clusters in response to the user selection, said further structuring including a new plurality of clusters.

Claim 7

The method of claim 4, further comprising the steps of: determining a summary for each of the plurality of secondary clusters prepared by said further structuring of the corpus defined by the documents associated with the selected one of said primary overlapping clusters; displaying the summaries for the plurality of secondary clusters.

Claim 8

The method of claim 4, further comprising the step of displaying, in response to the user selection of one of said secondary clusters, a list of the documents contained within the selected one of said secondary clusters.

Claim 9

A document browsing system for use with a corpus of unclustered documents stored in a computer system, the document browsing system comprising: program memory for storing executable program code therein; a processor, operating in response to the executable program stored in said program memory, for automatically preparing, in response to a query, an initial structuring of the corpus of unclustered documents into a plurality of document clusters, wherein at least two of the plurality of document clusters overlap and contain at least one common document therebetween; data memory for storing data identifying the documents associated with each of the plurality of document clusters; memory access means for accessing the data memory and said processor summarizing the plurality of document clusters and generating summary data for said document clusters; and a user interface for displaying the summary data.

Claim 10

A document browsing system for use with a corpus of unclustered documents stored in a computer system, the document browsing system comprising: program memory for storing executable program code therein; a processor, operating in response to the executable program stored in said program memory, for automatically preparing, in response to a query, an initial structuring of the corpus of unclustered documents into a plurality of document clusters, wherein at least two of the plurality of document clusters overlap and contain at least one common document therebetween; data memory for storing data identifying the documents associated with each of the plurality of document clusters; memory access means for accessing the data memory and said processor summarizing the plurality of document clusters and generating summary data for said document clusters; and a user interface for displaying the summary data.

Claim 11

The document browsing system of claim 8, wherein said user interface is responsive to a user selection of one of said document clusters having data displayed thereon, and wherein said processor further provides a second structuring of a subset of the corpus corresponding to the documents associated with the selected one of said document clusters.

Claim 12

A document search and retrieval method, operating in a digital computer, for searching a corpus of unclustered documents, comprising the steps of: identifying, in response to at least one user specified search term, a sub-corpus of unclustered documents containing the at least one user specified search term; preparing an initial structuring of the sub-corpus of unclustered documents into a plurality of primary overlapping clusters, wherein at least two of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters contain a document in common; and determining a summary of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters prepared by said initial structuring of the sub-corpus.

Claim 13

A document search and retrieval method, operating in a digital computer, for searching a corpus of unclustered documents, comprising the steps of: identifying, in response to at least one user specified search term, a sub-corpus of unclustered documents containing the at least one user specified search term; preparing an initial structuring of the sub-corpus of unclustered documents into a plurality of primary overlapping clusters, wherein at least two of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters contain a document in common; and determining a summary of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters prepared by said initial structuring of the sub-corpus.

Claim 14

The method of claim 10, further including the step of defining an inner cluster associated with at least one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters, said inner cluster consisting of documents found only in the one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters.

Claim 15

The method of claim 10, further including the step of defining an intermediate cluster, associated with at least one of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters, said intermediate cluster corresponding to a primary overlapping cluster and consisting of all documents, in the primary overlapping cluster, for which a corresponding attractor is the closest attractor.

Claim 16

The method of claim 10, further comprising the steps of: displaying the summary of the plurality of primary overlapping clusters; allowing a user to select one of said primary overlapping clusters from the displayed summary; and in response to a selection, preparing a further structuring of a sub-corpus defined by the documents associated with the selected one of said primary overlapping clusters, said further structuring including a plurality of secondary overlapping clusters.

Claim 17

The method of claim 13, further comprising the steps of: determining a summary of the plurality of secondary overlapping clusters prepared by said further structuring of the corpus defined by the documents associated with the selected one of said primary overlapping clusters; displaying the summary of the plurality of secondary overlapping clusters.

Claim 18

The method of claim 13, further comprising the step of displaying, in response to a user selection of a secondary overlapping cluster, a list of the documents contained within the selected one of said secondary overlapping clusters.