Khalid A Al-Kofahi

US Patent:

7593920, Sep 22, 2009

Filed:

Apr 4, 2002

Appl. No.:

10/117701

Inventors:

Peter Jackson - Burnsville MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rochester NY, US

Assignee:

West Services, Inc. - Eagan MN

International Classification:

G06F 7/00

US Classification:

707 3, 707 5, 707 10, 704 1, 706 7

Abstract:

The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case. One specific embodiment retrieves prior-case candidates based on information extracted from an input case, and then uses a support vector machine to determine which of the prior-case candidates are most probably prior cases for the input case.

US Patent:

7620626, Nov 17, 2009

Filed:

May 30, 2006

Appl. No.:

11/421043

Inventors:

Peter Jackson - Burnsville MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rochester NY, US

Assignee:

West Services, Inc. - Eagan MN

International Classification:

G06F 7/00

US Classification:

707 3, 707 5, 707 10, 704 1, 706 7

Abstract:

The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case. One specific embodiment retrieves prior-case candidates based on information extracted from an input case, and then uses a support vector machine to determine which of the prior-case candidates are most probably prior cases for the input case.

US Patent:

7984053, Jul 19, 2011

Filed:

Nov 16, 2009

Appl. No.:

12/619056

Inventors:

Peter Jackson - Burnsville MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rochester NY, US

Assignee:

West Services, Inc. - Eagan MN

International Classification:

G06F 7/00
G06F 17/00

US Classification:

707736, 707737, 707738, 707755, 707770, 706 7, 706 17, 704 1, 704 2, 704 7

Abstract:

The American legal system, judges and lawyers are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past judicial opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes. To facilitate these searches, some companies collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms, with some of the cases containing references to prior cases from other courts that have previously ruled on all or part of the same dispute. Identifying the prior cases is problematic, because, for example, conventional computer text-matching not only suggests too many non-prior cases, but also misses too many actual prior cases. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that generally facilitate identification of one or more documents that are related to a given document, and particularly facilitate identification of prior cases for a given case. One specific embodiment retrieves prior-case candidates based on information extracted from an input case, and then uses a support vector machine to determine which of the prior-case candidates are most probably prior cases for the input case.

US Patent:

8321425, Nov 27, 2012

Filed:

Aug 22, 2008

Appl. No.:

12/196930

Inventors:

Tonya Custis - Minneapolis MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rosemount MN, US

Assignee:

Thomson Reuters Global Resources

International Classification:

G06F 17/30

US Classification:

707748, 707750, 707770

Abstract:

To improve traditional keyword based search engines, the present inventors devised, among other things, systems, methods, and software that use word co-occurrence probabilities not only to identify documents conceptually related to user queries, but also to score and rank search results. One exemplary system combines inverse-document-frequency searching with concept searching based on word co-occurrence probabilities to facilitate finding of documents that would otherwise go unfound using a given query. The exemplary system also allows ranking of search results based both on both keyword matching and concept presence, promoting more efficient organization and review of search results.

US Patent:

20050228788, Oct 13, 2005

Filed:

Jan 3, 2005

Appl. No.:

11/028476

Inventors:

Michael Dahn - Farmington MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rosemount MN, US
Peter Jackson - Burnsville MN, US

International Classification:

G06F017/30

US Classification:

707003000

Abstract:

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and related IR systems, the present inventors recognized researchers often overlook some types of documents, such as legal encyclopedias and treatises that may be useful to them. Accordingly, the present inventors devised systems, methods, and software that automatically search for other types of documents not specifically targeted by user queries. One exemplary system automatically submits a user query for legal opinions to first and second databases, with the first storing legal opinions and the second storing non-opinion documents, such as headnotes from the West Key Number System, articles from American Law Reports, and/or articles from American Jurisprudence.

US Patent:

20080033929, Feb 7, 2008

Filed:

Oct 4, 2006

Appl. No.:

11/538749

Inventors:

Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rosemount MN, US
Michael Dahn - Farmington MN, US
Patrick Slaven - Penfield NY, US
Thomas Zielund - Shakopee MN, US
Qiang Lu - Rochester NY, US
Charles Elberti - Rochester NY, US

International Classification:

G06F 17/30

US Classification:

707 5, 707E17008

Abstract:

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and/or related systems, the present inventors devised, among other things, an exemplary legal research system that performs a conventional search to identify a set of starter documents and then leverages the metadata associated with these starter documents to identify another larger set of relevant documents. Documents in this alternate set are then scored using, for example, a learning machine and feature vectors that account for metadata relationships between the starter documents and alternate documents.

US Patent:

20100114911, May 6, 2010

Filed:

Aug 21, 2009

Appl. No.:

12/545642

Inventors:

Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rosemount MN, US
Peter Jackson - Burnsville MN, US
Timothy Earl Travers - Rochester NY, US
Alex Tyrell - Rochester NY, US

International Classification:

G06F 17/30

US Classification:

707748, 715256, 707E17046

Abstract:

To reduce cost and improve accuracy, the inventors devised systems, methods, and software to aid classification of text, such as headnotes and other documents, to target classes in a target classification system. For example, one system computes composite scores based on: similarity of input text to text assigned to each of the target classes; similarity of non-target classes assigned to the input text and target classes; probability of a target class given a set of one or more non-target classes assigned to the input text; and/or probability of the input text given text assigned to the target classes. The exemplary system then evaluates the composite scores using class-specific decision criteria, such as thresholds, ultimately assigning or recommending assignment of the input text to one or more of the target classes. The exemplary system is particularly suitable for classification systems having thousands of classes.

US Patent:

20100312764, Dec 9, 2010

Filed:

Jun 4, 2010

Appl. No.:

12/793846

Inventors:

Wenhui Liao - Minneapolis MN, US
Khalid Al-Kofahi - Rosemount MN, US
Isabelle Moulinier - Richfield MN, US

Assignee:

West Services Inc. - Eagan MN

International Classification:

G06F 17/30

US Classification:

707723, 707E17014

Abstract:

Systems and techniques are disclosed to rank documents by analyzing a query log generated by a search engine. The query log includes data relating to user behavior, queries and documents. The systems and techniques distill query log information into surrogate documents and extract features from these surrogate documents to rank the documents.