Patents by Inventor Cheng Niu

Cheng Niu has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 8326785
    Abstract: A classifier is built to rank documents of different languages found in a query based at least in part on similarity to other documents and the relevance of those other documents to the query. A joint ranking model, e.g., based upon a Boltzmann machine, is used to represent the content similarity among documents, and to help determine joint relevance probability for a set of documents. The relevant documents of one language are thus leveraged to improve the relevance estimation for documents of different languages. In one aspect, a hidden layer of units (neurons) represents clusters (corresponding to relevant topics) among the retrieved documents, with an output layer representing the relevant documents and their features, and edges representing a relationship between clusters and documents.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 30, 2008
    Date of Patent: December 4, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou, Hsiao-Wuen Hon
  • Patent number: 8249855
    Abstract: A set of candidate documents, each of which may be part of a bilingual, parallel set of documents, are identified. The set of documents illustratively includes textual material in a source language. It is then determined whether parallel text can be identified. For each document in the set of documents, it is first determined whether the parallel text resides within the document itself. If not, the document is examined for links to other documents, and those linked documents are examined for bilingual parallelism with the selected documents. If not, named entities are extracted from the document and translated into the target language. The translations are used to query search engines to retrieve the parallel correspondent for the selected documents.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 7, 2006
    Date of Patent: August 21, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu
  • Patent number: 8073679
    Abstract: A set of candidate parallel pages is identified based on trigger words in one or more pages downloaded from a given network location (such as a website). A set of document trees representing each of the candidate pages are aligned to identify translationally parallel content and hyperlinks. The parallel content is further fed into conventional sentence aligner for parallel sentences. And the parallel hyperlinks usually refer to other parallel documents, and lead to a recursive mining of parallel documents.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 23, 2010
    Date of Patent: December 6, 2011
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu, Lei Shi
  • Patent number: 8051061
    Abstract: Cross-lingual query suggestion (CLQS) aims to suggest relevant queries in a target language for a given query in a source language. The cross-lingual query suggestion is improved by exploiting the query logs in the target language. CLQS provides a method for learning and determining a similarity measure between two queries in different languages. The similarity measure is based on both translation information and monolingual similarity information, and in one embodiment uses both the query log itself and click-through information associated therewith. Monolingual and cross-lingual information such as word translation relations and word co-occurrence statistics may be used to estimate the cross-lingual query similarity with a discriminative model.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 19, 2008
    Date of Patent: November 1, 2011
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou
  • Patent number: 7917488
    Abstract: Cross-lingual search re-ranking is performed during a cross-lingual search in which a search query of a first language is used to retrieve two sets of documents, a first set in the first language, and a second set in a second language. The two sets of documents are each first ranked by the search engine separately. Cross-lingual search re-ranking then aims to provide a uniform re-ranking of both sets of documents combined. Cross-lingual search re-ranking uses a unified ranking function to compute the ranking order of each document of the first set and the second set of documents. The unified ranking function is constructed using generative probabilities based on multiple features, and can be learned by optimizing weight parameters using a training corpus. Ranking SVM algorithms may be used for the optimization.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 3, 2008
    Date of Patent: March 29, 2011
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou
  • Publication number: 20100286978
    Abstract: A set of candidate parallel pages is identified based on trigger words in one or more pages downloaded from a given network location (such as a website). A set of document trees representing each of the candidate pages are aligned to identify translationally parallel content and hyperlinks. The parallel content is further fed into conventional sentence aligner for parallel sentences. And the parallel hyperlinks usually refer to other parallel documents, and lead to a recursive mining of parallel documents.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 23, 2010
    Publication date: November 11, 2010
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu, Lei Shi
  • Patent number: 7805289
    Abstract: A set of candidate parallel pages is identified based on trigger words in one or more pages downloaded from a given network location (such as a website). A set of document trees representing each of the candidate pages are aligned to identify translationally parallel content and hyperlinks. The parallel content is further fed into conventional sentence aligner for parallel sentences. And the parallel hyperlinks usually refer to other parallel documents, and lead to a recursive mining of parallel documents.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 10, 2006
    Date of Patent: September 28, 2010
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu, Lei Shi
  • Publication number: 20100082511
    Abstract: Described is a technology in which a classifier is built to rank documents of different languages found in a query based at least in part on similarity to other documents and the relevance of those other documents to the query. A joint ranking model, e.g., based upon a Boltzmann machine, is used to represent the content similarity among documents, and to help determine joint relevance probability for a set of documents. The relevant documents of one language are thus leveraged to improve the relevance estimation for documents of different languages. In one aspect, a hidden layer of units (neurons) represents clusters (corresponding to relevant topics) among the retrieved documents, with an output layer representing the relevant documents and their features, and edges representing a relationship between clusters and documents.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 30, 2008
    Publication date: April 1, 2010
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou, Hsiao-Wuen Hon
  • Publication number: 20090222437
    Abstract: Cross-lingual search re-ranking is performed during a cross-lingual search in which a search query of a first language is used to retrieve two sets of documents, a first set in the first language, and a second set in a second language. The two sets of documents are each first ranked by the search engine separately. Cross-lingual search re-ranking then aims to provide a uniform re-ranking of both sets of documents combined. Cross-lingual search re-ranking uses a unified ranking function to compute the ranking order of each document of the first set and the second set of documents. The unified ranking function is constructed using generative probabilities based on multiple features, and can be learned by optimizing weight parameters using a training corpus. Ranking SVM algorithms may be used for the optimization.
    Type: Application
    Filed: March 3, 2008
    Publication date: September 3, 2009
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou
  • Publication number: 20090182547
    Abstract: Mining of translation pairs for cross-language translation uses a collective extraction model to exploit the similarity among the translation pairs and adaptively learn extraction patterns for each bilingual webpage. The process queries a web search engine by an initial term translation list to retrieve bilingual webpages containing translations, and crawls websites hosting the retreived bilingual webpages to retrieve additional bilingual webpages. The process then extracts additional translation pairs from the bilingual webpages retrieved by learning translation patterns of the bilingual webpages retrieved and adaptively extreacting translation pairs from the bilingual webpages using the learned translation patterns. More bilingual webpages may be acquired for additional website crawling and translation pair extracting by querying the web search engine by additional translation pairs.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 16, 2008
    Publication date: July 16, 2009
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Lei Shi, Ming Zhou
  • Publication number: 20090119090
    Abstract: A principled approach to paraphrasing analyzes input text and paraphrases at atomic linguistic level, instead of analyzing the input text and paraphrases as a whole set at one time. The principled approach extracts atomic linguistic elements from the input text and identifies matching atomic paraphrasing elements to form candidate atomic paraphrasing pairs. A variety of atomic transformation types are identified to form atomic paraphrasing pairs. The candidate atomic paraphrasing pairs are evaluated using feature functions and a probability model. The principled approach scores a combination of multiple candidate atomic paraphrasing pairs using a score function which derives its value from the feature functions of the candidate atomic paraphrasing pairs. A combination which has a high score may be used for constructing a paraphrasing text.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 1, 2007
    Publication date: May 7, 2009
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou
  • Publication number: 20090024613
    Abstract: Cross-lingual query suggestions (CLQS) aims to suggest relevant queries in a target language for a given query in a source language. The cross-lingual query suggestion is improved by exploiting the query logs in the target language. The disclosed techniques include a method for learning and determining a similarity measure between two queries in different languages. The similarity measure is based on both translation information and monolingual similarity information, and in one embodiment uses both the query log itself and click-through information associated therewith. Monolingual and cross-lingual information such as word translation relations and word co-occurrence statistics may be used to estimate the cross-lingual query similarity with a discriminative model.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 19, 2008
    Publication date: January 22, 2009
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Cheng Niu, Ming Zhou
  • Publication number: 20080082410
    Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer-readable media for dynamically generating text associated with an advertisement are provided. Core text associated with an advertisement is received from an advertiser, as is at least one attribute relevant to the advertiser and/or a user. Based upon the received attribute(s), it is determined whether customization of the core text is desired. If customization is desired, the core text is modified and presented in association with the advertisement. If customization is not desired, the core text is presented in association with the advertisement. In one embodiment, target advertisement placement information may also be utilized to determine whether customization of the core text is desired.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 3, 2006
    Publication date: April 3, 2008
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu, Zhaohui Tang, Ying Li, Chin-Yew Lin, Li Li, Brian Burdick
  • Publication number: 20080010056
    Abstract: A set of candidate parallel pages is identified based on trigger words in one or more pages downloaded from a given network location (such as a website). A set of document trees representing each of the candidate pages are aligned to identify translationally parallel content and hyperlinks. The parallel content is further fed into conventional sentence aligner for parallel sentences. And the parallel hyperlinks usually refer to other parallel documents, and lead to a recursive mining of parallel documents.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 10, 2006
    Publication date: January 10, 2008
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ming Zhou, Cheng Niu, Lei Shi
  • Patent number: 6971795
    Abstract: A seismic isolation bearing comprises a lower plate, an upper plate, and a cylindrical roller in rolling contact with an upwardly facing, bearing surface of the lower plate and a downwardly facing surface of the upper plate. The lower plate is fixable to a base, while the upper plate is fixable to a superstructure. One or both bearing surfaces are sloped to form a central trough at which the cylindrical roller resides under normal weight of the superstructure, and toward which the roller is biased when displacement between the plates occurs. A pair of sidewall members are fixed to the lower plate to withstand strong forces directed laterally with respect to the isolation axis along which rolling displacement occurs, and a pair of sliding guides carried one at each end of the roller provide dry frictional damping as they engage an inner wall surface of a corresponding sidewall member.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 25, 2003
    Date of Patent: December 6, 2005
    Inventors: George C. Lee, Zach Liang, Tie-Cheng Niu
  • Publication number: 20040131287
    Abstract: A seismic isolation bearing comprises a lower plate, an upper plate, and a cylindrical roller in rolling contact with an upwardly facing bearing surface of the lower plate and a downwardly facing surface of the upper plate. The lower plate is fixable to a base, while the upper plate is fixable to a superstructure, for example a bridge deck. One or both bearing surfaces are sloped to form a central trough at which the cylindrical roller resides under normal weight of the superstructure, and toward which the roller is biased when relative displacement between the lower and upper plates occurs to provide a constant restoring force. A pair of sidewall members are fixed to the lower plate to withstand strong forces directed laterally with respect to the isolation axis along which rolling displacement occurs, and a pair of sliding guides carried one at each end of the roller provide dry frictional damping as they engage an inner wall surface of a corresponding sidewall member.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 25, 2003
    Publication date: July 8, 2004
    Inventors: George C. Lee, Zach Liang, Tie-Cheng Niu
  • Publication number: 20030099413
    Abstract: A seismic isolation bearing comprises a lower plate, an upper plate, and a cylindrical roller in rolling contact with an upwardly facing bearing surface of the lower plate and a downwardly facing surface of the upper plate. The lower plate is fixable to a base, while the upper plate is fixable to a superstructure, for example a bridge deck. One or both bearing surfaces are sloped to form a central trough at which the cylindrical roller resides under normal weight of the superstructure, and toward which the roller is biased when relative displacement between the lower and upper plates occurs to provide a constant restoring force. A pair of sidewall members are fixed to the lower plate to withstand strong forces directed laterally with respect to the isolation axis along which rolling displacement occurs, and a pair of sliding guides carried one at each end of the roller provide dry frictional damping as they engage an inner wall surface of a corresponding sidewall member.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 26, 2001
    Publication date: May 29, 2003
    Inventors: George C. Lee, Zach Liang, Tie-Cheng Niu