Importance

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Abstract

A method and system for on-line monitoring of electronic communications include automatically monitoring text-based communications of one or more chat room or instant messaging participants to determine if a monitoring event has occurred. A monitoring event can be, for example, the combined existence of certain defined factors associated with a particular exchange relating to, for example, the exchange's participants, content, recent history, and/or tone. The existence of a monitoring event can result in one or more predetermined actions being taken by the system. In an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, on-line communications are continually monitored and input to a number of pattern recognizing modules, preferably working in parallel. Using known pattern-recognition techniques, each pattern recognizing module can analyze an aspect of such communications by implementing certain algorithms and, as appropriate, set, increase or decrease the values of one or more state variables descriptive of one or more defined attributes of the online communications. Such state variables can reflect, for example, emotional levels, participant turnover frequencies, use of suspicious word patterns, and other metrics regarding the on-line communications. State variables out put form the various pattern recognizing modules can be simultaneously input to a decision module which can launch one or more decision algorithms. The decision module can then output one or more predetermined actions as determined by the decision algorithms.

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First Claim