JPH01159759A - Document retrieving and displaying method - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To automatically display a corresponding sentence or a part of it in juxtaposition only designating character string by combining a step to specify a designated phrase, a step to retrieve an object designated in the designated phrase, and a step in which a document or a part of it that includes the object of designation is displayed in an appropriate position on the screen. CONSTITUTION:When an operator designates a designated phrase 52 by executing a position-designation by using a transparent tablet 6a provided on top of the screen of a cathode-ray tube 5 and a mouse/cursor 6c that moves when a mouse 6b is moved, the system extracts the designated phrase and specifies it out of the designated position and the document data that originates the display. Then a part corresponding to thus specified designated phrase is searched in the system, and displayed on the screen in a proper disposition. As a result, a part of document including the designated object 54 for the designated phrase 52 is displayed in juxtaposition in a frame 53.

Description

[Detailed Description of the Invention] [Industrial Application Field] The present invention relates to an electronic document information system, and in particular, the present invention relates to an electronic document information system, and in particular, to a display terminal of the computerized document information system,
The present invention relates to a system that automatically juxtaposes and displays related parts within a document, other related documents, or related parts within other documents.

[Conventional technology]

Using a device to display information such as a CRT display, and a device such as a cursor, mouse, keyboard, or tablet to select one of the displayed items,
A system has already been put into practical use, such as the Captain System, in which when an operator selects one of the displayed items according to the operator's interest, a more detailed explanation of that item is retrieved.

Also, JP-A-60-15736. As described in ``Item Information Display Method'', there is also a method of displaying more detailed information about the displayed item in response to an operator's instructions during interactive processing on a computer.

[Problem that the invention seeks to solve]

In the above-mentioned conventional systems, the selection items and the corresponding information to be displayed are described in advance in the program that controls the system or in the form of control data. Information can be viewed by sequentially tracing only the items that are allowed to be selected on the screen. To this end, when the system provider designs and builds the system, it is necessary to prepare information to be displayed corresponding to all selection trees, and to create data that correlates the location of information corresponding to each selection. It is necessary to create and register it in the system.

On the other hand, literature searches using keywords are being conducted for literature information accumulated in electronic databases. However, in this case, only the presence or absence of a relationship with the keyword for the entire literature in the - edition is registered, and -
Searching and displaying mutually related parts within m documents or within multiple documents is not performed.

An object of the present invention is to search for related parts within a document or between documents, and display the entire document including the related parts obtained as a result of the search, or a portion thereof, sequentially on a terminal in accordance with an operator's request. It is to be realized electronically on etc.

[Means for solving problems]

In order to achieve the above object, the present invention executes the following three steps in combination.

(1) The operator selects from among the documents displayed on the screen.
Identifying a directive phrase by indicating a certain display site.

(2) Step 6 of searching for the target indicated by the above-mentioned directive phrase. (3) Step of displaying the document or a part thereof including the above-mentioned referent at an appropriate position on the screen.

Note that directive phrases are words that specify a certain document, such as the document's name, document registration number, chapter number, page number, line number, and page number.
Drawing number 2 means a phrase that indicates a relative position within a sentence band, a phrase that indicates a specific position within a document by a combination of these, or a phrase that is formed by a combination of these.

[Effect]

FIG. 2 shows the CR in the terminal 50 when the present invention is implemented.
A display example on the TS is shown. Initially, a part of the document is displayed within a frame 51. Here, a transparent tablet 6a is placed superimposed on the screen.

By specifying the position using the mouse cursor 60, etc., which is moved by moving the mouse 6b? The operator specifies a certain instruction phrase 52, and the system extracts and specifies the instruction phrase from its position and the document data that is the source of the display.

Next, the system searches for a location corresponding to the specified instruction phrase, and displays it at an appropriate position on the screen. As a result, as shown in Figure 2, the directive phrase 52 is placed within the frame 53.
A portion of the document including the referent 54 is displayed side by side.

According to the present invention, as explained above based on FIG.
Information that the operator needs to read a certain document, etc.
It is possible to provide a system that can be called up from within the system and obtained as a display efficiently and with simple operations for the operator.

〔Example〕

Hereinafter, one embodiment of the present invention will be described according to the flowchart shown in FIG.

In step 101, a sentence, a certain page of the document, or a part of the page is displayed on the screen of the system. This is usually displayed based on instructions such as inputting a document name by the operator, and scrolling, page turning, etc. are performed on the screen in response to the operator's requests.

In step 102, the operator looks at the displayed content and instructs a corresponding instruction phrase on the display screen in order to retrieve other sentences related to the displayed sentence or other related documents. This is to detect. This is operated when the operator desires, so the system is on standby at this step. Naturally, operations such as turning the page, scrolling, and closing the display can also be performed from this step, but these are omitted in the figure.

Furthermore, the operator can use various devices to indicate the direction of instruction. For example, direct instructions using a transparent tablet 6a placed directly on a display screen as shown in FIG. 2, movement of a mouse cursor 6c and pressing of a mouse button using a mouse 6b, and cursor movement using a keyboard 6d. The present invention can be carried out using any method, such as pressing a predetermined key, using a separate tablet, or using a combination of the above devices.

Note that when specifying the direction in this step, you can specify two points, the start point and the end point, of the direction, or trace the direction on the transparent tablet 6a, or move the cursor while holding down the mouse button. A method of instructing by moving 6c with a pointing magatama, a method of instructing by drawing an arc enclosing the entire indicated direction on a transparent tablet 6a, or a method of indicating one point within a directive phrase. There are ways to do this.

If a method of specifying only one point within a directive phrase is used, a method of specifying the range of the directive direction as described later is required.

In step 10H3, the input value indicating the position on the screen specified by the operator in step 102, 1 the display position on the screen of the currently displayed document, 1 the position within the document of the displayed display content, and the The character string that the operator attempted to specify is specified based on the format information and the like. Furthermore, it is possible to identify whether the specified character string targets one document name, registration number, page number within the document, one line number, one drawing number, one table number, or a combination thereof. and establish it as a direction. A more detailed implementation method regarding this step will be explained later.

In the directive direction established in this step, if there are no words in the character string that designate a specific document, but only words that designate a specific position or element within a certain document, this directive phrase is used in the step. It may be interpreted that the other location in the document that has already been displayed in step 101 is targeted. Additionally, if the character string contains only words that specify a specific document, but no words that specify a specific position within the document such as page number, it is interpreted as indicating the beginning of the sentence in the target document. Just do it. Also, for example, if the document is targeted at a specific document, just as a written amendment to a patent always targets a specific specification, indicate a specific position within the document in the direction of the indication. Even if there is only a word, it can be interpreted as referring to a specific position in the corresponding target document.

Next, in step 104, the target location of the indicated direction obtained in step 103 is searched, and its location is determined.

Here, if the instruction is directed to a document that has already been displayed in step 101, the document data has already been read into the system memory from the document database, so the location of the object of the instruction is known. All you need to do is find the position within the system.

On the other hand, if the pointing direction is for another document, it is necessary to first read the document from the document database into the system memory and then find the location of the pointing object. Also, when dealing with documents such as the patent amendment mentioned above, where the document to be referenced is known in advance,
If the corresponding document is read into the system memory in advance, that is, if the corresponding specification is also read at the time when the request to display the written amendment is made in step 1, 01, the present invention can be made more efficient. Good〈Can be implemented.

In step 105, a portion including the referent obtained in step 104 is displayed.

Here, for example, several lines of the document may be displayed so that the indicated location is located in the center of the frame 53 shown in FIG. 2, or the entire page including the indicated location may be displayed. Also,
If the referent is a drawing or table, the entirety of it, or
It may be displayed in part or after being reduced.

After this, the process returns to step 102 and waits for the next operation. Note that before the pointing in step 102, the display of the text may be changed by scrolling, turning pages, etc. In that case, the process returns to step +02 and waits for the first pointing operation.

Further, the present invention may also be applied to the document displayed in step 105. This can be achieved by providing the same steps as steps 102 to 105 after step 105 and providing the same flow as steps 101 to 105. As a result, for example, the reference documents searched and displayed according to the present invention can easily be used to sequentially refer back to the reference documents that are further referred to.

Any number of such layers may be provided. Furthermore, if it is possible to implement the present invention regardless of how many layers the displayed document is displayed, the present invention can be implemented for which document among the documents displayed on the same screen. Since there is no need for the operator to make a judgment as to whether the system can be used or not, the operability of the system is further improved.

Figure 1 shows the case where five documents are stored in character codes.
This figure shows an example of a system configuration.

There is a document data area 2 for storing documents read from the literature database 1 in the system. The document data area 2 stores character string code data 21 and format data 22, respectively. Character string code data 21 and format data 22 of a certain page of the document are sent to the drawing processing section 3, and the document is written into the frame memory 4 based on them. The contents of frame memory 4 are immediately displayed on the CRTS.

A transparent tablet 6a is placed over the display surface of the CRT 5. When the operator specifies a certain position in the displayed document by touching the tablet 6a in step 102.

The screen coordinate value 71 is determined by the tablet input circuit 7, and a trigger 7 is sent to the character string indexing section 8 by a touch operation.
2 is input. This is done by moving the mouse 6b to move the cursor 6c.
A similar result can be obtained by moving the mouse button and pressing the mouse button.

Next, in order to determine the directive phrase, the character string indexing section 8 first calculates the screen coordinate value 71 expressed in the coordinate series of the display screen based on the display position of the document page, for example, the display frame 51 in FIG. Based on the position on the screen, convert it into a coordinate series of the displayed document page. 6. Next, calculate the line number and column position of the directive based on the document format data 22 and the coordinate values in the displayed document page. Determine 6 Furthermore, the position of the directive phrase in the character string code data 21 is determined using the display page number as data. In other words, if the display position of the document on the screen and information about the format of the document, such as the character spacing between two lines, the size of the top, bottom, left, and right margins, are known, then the text corresponding to the specified position from the position on the screen is known. You can determine the location in the code. The character string indexing unit 8 further reads data at that position from within the character string code data 21 and uses it as a directive phrase.

Here, when the operator indicates a range from the beginning to the end of the instruction phrase, it is sufficient to pick out the corresponding character string in the corresponding character string code data 21. When the operator specifies only one point, the range within the character string of the instruction phrase is estimated. To do this, for example, if the specified character is a number, the numbers before and after it, as well as "line", "page", "chapter", "
``Figure''``Table'' ``Reference number J rlsBNJ or ``
If there are character strings such as ``th'' and ``said'', they are included in one directive phrase. Although this method is not perfect, the operator's confirmation may be obtained by highlighting the estimated instruction phrase (blinking, inverting black and white, underlining, changing the brightness level, etc.). In this case, by allowing the operator to respecify the range of the instruction phrase as necessary, the user can take action if the system makes a mistake in estimating the instruction phrase.

The character string determined by the character string determining section 8 is sent to the directive phrase interpreting section 9. Here, one line "Page""Chapter""Figure""
A key word indicating a specific position in a pre-registered document, such as document number J rIsT'3NJ, and the reference target of the character string are identified based on the associated several character strings, character strings, etc. .for example.

In order to identify a page in a certain document, it is sufficient to cut out a character string consisting of only a few characters written immediately before the key word "page" and convert it into a number to obtain an antilog number. If the key word is followed by a related number, such as "document number," cut out the string consisting of only a few characters written immediately after the key word and convert it to a number. . In addition, when a document is written by its name, the document name is generally specified first in the demonstrative phrase, so the particle ``no'' and the comma ``,'' start from the first letter of the demonstrative phrase. All you have to do is cut out the character string just before it appears and interpret that character string as the name of the referent document. Here, the referent is [a certain line on a certain page of a certain document]
It is defined in a hierarchical manner.

In addition, "the above" is included in the character string determined by the character string indexing unit 8.
If there is an instruction word indicating a positional relationship with an instruction phrase such as , an appropriate command 91 is sent to the control section 10 .

For example, in the case of "said", the instruction 91 is for searching forward in the same document from the position of the directive phrase for the character string following that word.

Further, the directive phrase interpreter 9 sends a command 91 to search for a referent to the controller 10.

The control unit 10 reads necessary documents based on instructions 91. If the target document here is the same as document data 2, you can read it directly from document data 2,
On the other hand, if the documents are not the same, it is sufficient to search for the necessary document from the document database 1, temporarily store it in the document data area 11, and then read it. Furthermore, the control unit 10 searches for a necessary position in the document of one document data 2 or 11 based on the command part of the command 91 that instructs a specific part in the document, and sends the part containing it to the drawing processing part 3. te, CRT
The document data 2 is displayed in parallel with the document data 2 already displayed on G.

Furthermore, by providing a plurality of document data areas 11, the present invention can be applied to a plurality of documents. That is, by specifying a directive phrase in the document that is searched from the stored original document and displayed, another document can be searched and displayed, and this can be repeated.

In the above embodiment, a system in which a display document is generated from a character code string has been described, but the present invention can also be implemented in a system having a database in which a display document is originally input as an image. In this case, the character string indexing section 8 may be implemented as follows.

First, an area near the coordinate value 71 input to this section 8 is cut out from the frame memory 4, and then an area corresponding to the designated character is cut out. After character recognition processing is performed on this character data, the character string obtained through optical processing is sent to the directive phrase interpretation section 9. Since there are already many methods for character recognition, their explanation will be omitted here.

Further, an example of how the control unit 10 specifies a specific position within a document will be described below, taking the case of a horizontally written document as an example. First, it is easy to obtain a specific page of a certain document because documents are usually stored in the document database 1 as images for each page. Next, the number of lines can be determined by determining the pixel value distribution in the vertical direction in units of one pixel or a plurality of pixels in the horizontal direction within the document page. That is, for example, when the background color is white and the text color is black, horizontal pixel lines in which the proportion of black pixels is less than or equal to a predetermined threshold are assumed to be between the lines.

The portion where such pixel lines appear continuously can be determined as the line spacing, and thereby the position directly above the document image of each line can be obtained. Furthermore, the position within a row can also be determined by using the above method by taking the pixel value distribution in the horizontal direction.

When implementing the present invention, documents obtained as a result of a search may be displayed as follows.

If there is space to display the entire document, including the referent, display the entire document. At this time, at least the vicinity of the designated portion of the original text remains on the display screen. Furthermore, if it is not possible to display the entire text while leaving the original text intact, it may be possible to select whether to display only one page or only a few lines including the designated portion. If the target is a drawing, photographic image, etc.,
It is only necessary to reduce the size and display it according to its size. Also,
Highlighting (blinking) the instructions in the displayed document.

(reversing black and white, changing brightness, character color, etc.), it is easier for the operator to match the designated location.

〔Effect of the invention〕

According to the present invention, by simply specifying a character string in a document, a corresponding part of the document can be automatically searched and displayed side by side, and the operator can search the displayed page, scroll the position, etc. There is no need to perform operations such as displaying other documents and searching for a specific position therein. Therefore, it is possible to provide new functions that were not possible with the conventional method of viewing documents bound in paper, and it is possible to proceed with understanding the document without interrupting thinking, thereby improving work efficiency.

[Brief explanation of the drawing]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of the present invention, FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a display example for explaining the present invention in detail, and FIG. 3 is a flowchart showing one method of the present invention.

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1. In a system that displays necessary parts sequentially or juxtaposed from document data stored in the system, (1) a screen position designated for a certain displayed document; The first step is to extract a directive phrase that is displayed at that position and indicates whether it is a specific location within the same document, another document, or a specific location within another document based on (2) a second step of searching for the target indicated by the extracted directive phrase and finding the location of the target; (3) searching for the target indicated by the extracted directive phrase; A method for searching and displaying a document, comprising: a third step of displaying the contents including the target and its front part, rear part, or both parts.