BACKGROUND:  Doubly Ranked Information Retrieval (DRIR) and Area Search are two extensions to Ranked Information Retrieval (RIR), of which Web search is a prominent example. Together, DRIR and Area Search offer the promise of more efficient and productive topical research. For instance, think of a graduate student seeking to understand a technical field, or of a market analyst wanting to grasp an industrial sector. Both researchers would normally conduct basic web or proprietary database searches that would uncover hundreds, if not thousands, of "relevant" papers, trade articles, book chapters, presentations, videos, etc. The researcher would then exert substantial effort to sift through the plethora of returned documents so as to identify those documents that are most useful. DRIR and Area Search, however, automatically conduct this sifting process for the user, thus allowing the researcher to better understand the topic of interest in less time.

INNOVATION:  Doubly Ranked Information Retrieval considers a collection of documents (e.g., a journal), where each document consists of a set of weighted terms. DRIR returns those terms and documents that are most "representative" of that collection. DRIR represents the collection as a document-term weight matrix and uses an iterative procedure that generates the two primary singular vectors of this matrix. One of these singular vectors is used to create a "signature" of the collection. The signature is composed of term-score pairs and is the key to selecting the most representative terms and documents.

Area Search is used to find those collections from a given set of document collections that best match a query. It first uses DRIR to compute a signature for each of the collections. Once a user query is received, Area Search returns the best matching collections based on a similarity measure between the query and each of the signatures, and for each returned collection, its most representative terms and documents. DRIR, the scheme for calculating signatures is at the center of Area Search. It has been shown that DRIR's signature does better than the other signature schemes, making the Area Search invention very useful.

POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS 

• Internet search
• Topical research
• Enterprise search
• Information retrieval

ADVANTAGES

• Improved organization of information
• Higher quality research in less time

DEVELOPMENT-TO-DATE:  The invention has been implemented and verified in software.

Reference: UCLA Case No. 2005-686

PCT Application: US06/022044