US Patent 7107528 Automatic completion of dates

The present invention relates to electronic information processing. In particular, it relates to a method and system for processing a document, which comprises text information, comprising monitoring the occurrence of incomplete time-related citations, in particular the citation of a date, within the text information, and completing said incomplete citation. In order to improve methods of automatic completion of time-related citations in documents, the inventional method completes incomplete citations of a date, within a text of a document by applying (160) a set of predetermined completing rules by using all time information relating to the document. The sources of time information are the text itself, the document “container” and the enclosing applications e.g. a word processor. Thus, e.g. search engines can find such documents in the Internet by entering any complete or incomplete dates. Using an index can optimize and speed up the search for relevant documents.