[Sigia-l] US Patent 6,363,373

[Andrew McNaughton]

How many people here are responsible for prior art in regards to this
Microsoft patent?


http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%226,363,373%22.WKU.

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Method and apparatus for concept searching using a Boolean or keyword
     search engine

Abstract

Concept searching using a Boolean or keyword search engine. Documents are
preprocessed before being passed to a search engine by identifying, on a
word-by-word basis, the "word tokens" contained in the document. Once the
word tokens have been extracted, each word token is referenced in a
concept database that maps word tokens to concept identifiers. The concept
identifiers associated with the word tokens are converted into unique
non-word concept tokens and arranged into a list. The list is then
inserted into the document as invisible but searchable text. The document
is then transferred to the server monitored by the search engine.  Search
queries are preprocessed before being passed to the search engine in the
same manner. The query is first broken into word tokens and the word
tokens are then referenced in the concept database. All associated concept
identifiers are retrieved and converted to unique concept tokens. The
concept tokens are then combined into a string and sent to the search
engine as an ordinary query.

Inventors:	Steinkraus; David W. (Redmond, WA)
Assignee:	Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Appl. No.:	164284
Filed:		October 1, 1998