METHOD FOR SEARCHING DATES EFFICIENTLY IN COLLECTION OF WEB DOCUMENTS, COMPUTER PROGRAM, AND SERVICE METHOD (SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SEARCHING DATES EFFICIENTLY IN COLLECTION OF WEB DOCUMENTS)

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a date querying system which processes free-form text in documents to identify and locate some or all of the dates in the documents using extended regular expression matching to capture various date formats. SOLUTION: The system packages a canonicalized format of each identified date to support various types of queries such as, for example, specific date querying, hierarchical date querying, range date querying, proximity queries comprising a date and any keywords, and any combination of types of queries. The system scans a document to identify the various format dates occurring in the document, disambiguates the resulting occurrences of dates, and canonicalizes the dates according to one or more predetermined formats. COPYRIGHT: (C)2007,JPO&INPIT