Automated unit finding for numeric information retrieval

摘要

The present invention is related to the task of retrieving numeric information in response to a textual keyword-based query by automatically associating a unit to the type of data being retrieved. An information retrieval system is presented which suggests a unit for data exploration by leveraging the local environment of numeric data across the corpus. This local environment is parsed, including through natural language processing and proximity-based techniques, to determine units relevant to particular keyword phrases. The system also relies on knowledge of semantically and scientifically related units to optimize their binning for suggested unit scoring.