Abstract: The present invention is a system and method for determining whether the best category for an object under investigation is a mixture of preexisting categories, and how the mixture is constituted. This invention is useful both for suggesting the need for new categories, and for a fixed set of categories, determining whether a document should be assigned to multiple categories. The objects of the categorization system are typically, but need not be, documents. Categorization may be by subject-matter, language or other criteria. The invention causes extra information to be stored in a category index, so that the determination of mixed categories using the methods presented here is performed extremely efficiently.

Abstract: A computer system has a document collection of one or more documents and one or more indexes that each include an inverted file with one or more terms. Each of the terms is associated with one or more document identifiers. The index further includes a document catalog that associates each of the document identifiers with one or more attributes, either intrinsic or non intrinsic. A search engine process produces a hit list having one or more hit list entries. Each hit list entry, with one or more hit list attributes, is associated with one of the documents that is determined by the search engine to be relevant to the query. A formatter processor selects one or more of the hit list attributes, identified by a hit list attribute selector and then compares the selected attributes of two or more entries on the hit list to determine whether or not documents associated with these entries are duplicate instances of one another.

Abstract: Topically relevant objects in an object database are first identified using any generally known methods to obtain a set of topically relevant objects (topically relevant set). Parents, and in alternative embodiments other ancestors, of one or more of the topically relevant objects are identified according to directional structural relationships that the parents have with respect to the topically relevant objects. These objects form a set of structurally relevant objects (structurally relevant set). In some embodiments, the user query identifies one or more of these structural relationships. The topically relevant objects are then organized under one or more of their respective parents to form a hierarchy level of both (topically relevant and structurally relevant) sets of objects. In some preferred embodiments, the process can iterate to create more than one hierarchy level.

Abstract: In an information retrieval system, a query issued by the user is analyzed by a query engine into query elements. After the query has been evaluated against the document collections, a resulting hit list is presented to the user, e.g., as a table. The presented hit list displays not only an overall rank of a document but also a contribution of each query element to the rank of the document. The user can reorder the hit list by prioritizing the contribution of individual query elements to override the overall rank and by assigning additional weight(s) to those contributions.