Methods and systems for providing automated actions on recognized text strings in a computer-generated document

Abstract

Methods and systems provide for automatically performing actions on or in association with text or data strings that are recognized as belonging to certain semantic categories. Text entered by a user is passed to a recognizer application. If a given text or data string is recognized as belonging to a given semantic category, the recognizer application passes data corresponding to the recognized string back to a host application. In response to recognized text or data, a pointer to the object model of the host application may be passed to the recognizer application to allow the recognizer application to perform any function of the host application in response to the recognized string. Alternatively, after the recognizer application passes data corresponding to the recognized string back to the host application, the host application may fire an application level or document level event for causing an action component to perform desired actions on recognized strings. Alternatively, after a string is recognized by the recognizer application, the recognizer application may set a property associated with a desired action to be performed on or in association with the recognized string. The host application may call an action component identified by the property for automatically performing the desired action on or in association with the recognized string.

Description

technical field

[0001] The present invention relates generally to text and data recognition in computer-generated documents. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to methods and systems for providing automated actions on or associated with recognized text and data strings in computer-generated documents. Background technique

[0002] Since the advent of computers and software, software developers have attempted to provide software users with helpful functions that are naturally contextual. For example, software has been developed to detect that a user is entering data into a computer-generated document when the user is typing a date. Before the user completes the date, the software application indicates to the user that the date is automatically completed. Other software has been developed for providing helpful actions to users in response to certain data entered by the user. For example, if the user's word processing application recognizes that the user ...

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