Mayank A Prakash

US Patent:

58192581, Oct 6, 1998

Filed:

Mar 7, 1997

Appl. No.:

8/847734

Inventors:

Shivakumar Vaithyanathan - San Jose CA
Robert Travis - Concord MA
Mayank Prakash - Acton MA

Assignee:

Digital Equipment Corporation - Maynard MA

International Classification:

G06F 1730

US Classification:

707 2

Abstract:

A top-down clustering method and apparatus recursively processes clusters of documents by first extracting features from the documents comprising the cluster, then using the extracted features to generate sub-clusters and finally using the generated sub-clusters to develop topics and identifiers for each sub-cluster. This process is repeated for each cluster and sub-cluster in a recursive manner so that clustering is performed using features extracted from each document in a cluster to perform sub-clustering. Feature extraction is performed by using frequency counts of terms taken from each document in a cluster and discarding terms falling outside of predetermined boundaries computed based on the total number of documents in the cluster. After bounding, the number of tokens is reduced prior to clustering by means of a correlation technique, such as a PCA model.