Methodology and search engine which can be applied to the patent literature, especially

摘要

A search engine for searching based on related scientific or technological concepts, comprises: a learning module for learning about relationships between technical phrases based on their rates of occurrence in related documents, therefrom to form concepts from groupings of related phrases, and a search module for searching for related documents to a query document based on occurrence in said related documents of concepts present in said query document, the learning module carrying out said learning based on a training set of documents and inter-document relations.