Patents by Inventor Tonya Custis

Tonya Custis 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: 11615492
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for analyzing citationally related content and identifying, based on the analysis, a risk of impliedly overruled content. Embodiments provide for receiving case law data from a document source, for extracting a case triple that includes a first case overruling or abrogating a second case, and a third case citationally related to the second case. Features may be generated from case triple, such as natural processing language features comparing the language in the various cases of the triple, and feeding the generated features to a main classifier. In embodiments, the main classifier classifies the case triple into a class indicating the risk probability that the second case is impliedly overruled by the first case.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 14, 2019
    Date of Patent: March 28, 2023
    Assignee: Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH
    Inventors: Julian Brooke, Kanika Madan, Hector Martinez Alonso, Afsaneh Fazly, Tonya Custis, Isabelle Moulinier, Gayle McElvain, Diane Erickson, Khaled Ammar
  • Publication number: 20210382878
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for generating contextually, grammatically, and conversationally correct answers to input questions. Embodiments provide for linguistic and syntactic structure analysis of a submitted question in order to determine whether the submitted question may be answered by at least one headnote. The question is then further analyzed to determine more details about the intent and context of the question. A federated search process, based on the linguistic and syntactic structure analysis, and the additional analysis of the question is used to identify candidate question-answer pairs from a corpus of previously created headnotes. Machine learning models are used to analyze the candidate question-answer pairs, additional rules are applied to rank the candidate answers, and dynamic thresholds are applied to identify the best potential answers to provide to a user as a response to the submitted question.
    Type: Application
    Filed: August 16, 2021
    Publication date: December 9, 2021
    Inventors: Gayle McElvain, Tonya Custis, Matthew A. Surprenant, Erik Lindberg
  • Patent number: 11106664
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for generating contextually, grammatically, and conversationally correct answers to input questions. Embodiments provide for linguistic and syntactic structure analysis of a submitted question in order to determine whether the submitted question may be answered by at least one headnote. The question is then further analyzed to determine more details about the intent and context of the question. A federated search process, based on the linguistic and syntactic structure analysis, and the additional analysis of the question is used to identify candidate question-answer pairs from a corpus of previously created headnotes. Machine learning models are used to analyze the candidate question-answer pairs, additional rules are applied to rank the candidate answers, and dynamic thresholds are applied to identify the best potential answers to provide to a user as a response to the submitted question.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 2, 2019
    Date of Patent: August 31, 2021
    Assignee: Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH
    Inventors: Gayle McElvain, Tonya Custis, Matthew A. Surprenant, Erik Lindberg
  • Publication number: 20190347748
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for analyzing citationally related content and identifying, based on the analysis, a risk of impliedly overruled content. Embodiments provide for receiving case law data from a document source, for extracting a case triple that includes a first case overruling or abrogating a second case, and a third case citationally related to the second case. Features may be generated from case triple, such as natural processing language features comparing the language in the various cases of the triple, and feeding the generated features to a main classifier. In embodiments, the main classifier classifies the case triple into a class indicating the risk probability that the second case is impliedly overruled by the first case.
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 14, 2019
    Publication date: November 14, 2019
    Inventors: Julian Brooke, Kanika Madan, Hector Martinez Alonso, Afsaneh Fazly, Tonya Custis, Isabelle Moulinier, Gayle McElvain, Diane Erickson, Khaled Ammar
  • Publication number: 20190340172
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for generating contextually, grammatically, and conversationally correct answers to input questions. Embodiments provide for linguistic and syntactic structure analysis of a submitted question in order to determine whether the submitted question may be answered by at least one headnote. The question is then further analyzed to determine more details about the intent and context of the question. A federated search process, based on the linguistic and syntactic structure analysis, and the additional analysis of the question is used to identify candidate question-answer pairs from a corpus of previously created headnotes. Machine learning models are used to analyze the candidate question-answer pairs, additional rules are applied to rank the candidate answers, and dynamic thresholds are applied to identify the best potential answers to provide to a user as a response to the submitted question.
    Type: Application
    Filed: May 2, 2019
    Publication date: November 7, 2019
    Inventors: Gayle McElvain, Tonya Custis, Matthew A. Surprenant, Erik Lindberg
  • Patent number: 8321425
    Abstract: To improve traditional keyword based search engines, the present inventors devised, among other things, systems, methods, and software that use word co-occurrence probabilities not only to identify documents conceptually related to user queries, but also to score and rank search results. One exemplary system combines inverse-document-frequency searching with concept searching based on word co-occurrence probabilities to facilitate finding of documents that would otherwise go unfound using a given query. The exemplary system also allows ranking of search results based both on both keyword matching and concept presence, promoting more efficient organization and review of search results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 22, 2008
    Date of Patent: November 27, 2012
    Assignee: Thomson Reuters Global Resources
    Inventors: Tonya Custis, Khalid Al-Kofahi
  • Publication number: 20090198674
    Abstract: To improve traditional keyword based search engines, the present inventors devised, among other things, systems, methods, and software that use word co-occurrence probabilities not only to identify documents conceptually related to user queries, but also to score and rank search results. One exemplary system combines inverse-document-frequency searching with concept searching based on word co-occurrence probabilities to facilitate finding of documents that would otherwise go unfound using a given query. The exemplary system also allows ranking of search results based both on both keyword matching and concept presence, promoting more efficient organization and review of search results.
    Type: Application
    Filed: August 22, 2008
    Publication date: August 6, 2009
    Inventors: Tonya Custis, Khalid Al-Kofahi