Systems and methods providing computer-implemented content propagation for enhanced document retrieval are described. In one aspect, reference information directed to one or more documents is identified. The reference information is identified from one or more sources of data that are independent of a data source that includes the one or more documents. Metadata that is proximally located to the reference information is extracted from the one or more sources of data. Relevance between respective features of the metadata to content of associated ones of the one or more documents is calculated. For each document of the one or more documents, associated portions of the metadata is indexed with the relevance of features from the respective portions into original content of the document. The indexing generates one or more enhanced documents.

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To enable computer-implemented content propagation for enhanced document retrieval. SOLUTION: Reference information directed to one or a plurality of documents is identified. The reference information is identified from one or a plurality of sources of data that are independent of a data source including the one or a plurality of documents. Metadata that are proximally located to the reference information are extracted from the one or a plurality of sources of data. Relevance between respective features of the metadata to contents of associated ones of the one or a plurality of documents is calculated. For each document of the one or a plurality of documents, associated portions of the metadata are indexed with the relevance of features from the respective portions into original contents of the document. The indexing preparing function generates one or a plurality of enhanced documents. COPYRIGHT: (C)2006,JPO&NCIPI

Systems and methods for mining service requests for product support are described. In one aspect, unstructured service requests are converted to one or more structured answer objects. Each structured answer object includes hierarchically structured historic problem diagnosis data. In view of a product problem description, a set of the one or more structured answer data objects is identified. Each structured solution data object in the set includes term(s) and/or phrase(s) related to the product problem description. Historic and hierarchically structured problem diagnosis data from the set is provided to an end-user for product problem diagnosis.