Patents by Inventor Emma Curran

Emma Curran 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).

  • Method and system for finding the focus of a document
    Patent number: 7953754
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for identifying the focus of a document, in a natural language processing application, the natural language processing application comprising a hierarchical concept tree having a plurality of nodes, each node being associated with a term, the method comprising the steps of: mapping an input document to nodes in a concept tree to determine a number of occurrences of a term in the input document which also occur at a node in the concept tree; weighting each node in the concept tree, depending on the determined number of occurrences of the term in the input document and a determined value assigned to each node in the concept tree; traversing the concept tree to identify a heaviest weighted path, in dependence on the weighting of each node in the concept tree; and determining the focus of the input document by identifying a node having the heaviest weight along the most heavily-weighted path.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 4, 2007
    Date of Patent: May 31, 2011
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Kevin Cunnane, Emma Curran, Jan Macek, Daniel McCloskey, Brendan Moorehead, Ross Shannon, Alexander Troussov
  • METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR FINDING THE FOCUS OF A DOCUMENT
    Publication number: 20080005094
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for identifying the focus of a document, in a natural language processing application, the natural language processing application comprising a hierarchical concept tree having a plurality of nodes, each node being associated with a term, the method comprising the steps of: mapping an input document to nodes in a concept tree to determine a number of occurrences of a term in the input document which also occur at a node in the concept tree; weighting each node in the concept tree, depending on the determined number of occurrences of the term in the input document and a determined value assigned to each node in the concept tree; traversing the concept tree to identify a heaviest weighted path, in dependence on the weighting of each node in the concept tree; and determining the focus of the input document by identifying a node having the heaviest weight along the most heavily-weighted path.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 4, 2007
    Publication date: January 3, 2008
    Inventors: Kevin Cunnane, Emma Curran, Jan Macek, Daniel McCloskey, Brendan Moorehead, Ross Shannon, Alexander Troussov