Patent 7840569 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on November, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A neural network is used to process a set of ranking features in order to determine the relevancy ranking for a set of documents or other items. The neural network calculates a predicted relevancy score for each document and the documents can then be ordered by that score. Alternate embodiments apply a set of data transformations to the ranking features before they are input to the neural network. Training can be used to adapt both the neural network and certain of the data transformations to target environments.