HEURISTIC MATCHING METHOD FOR USE IN FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

A heuristic method is described for use with a financial system, wherein the method receives a newly added research item, extracts a text-based index from the newly added research item, applying a plurality of heuristics to said extracted text-based index, matches results of heuristics application with each of the following entity types: companies contacts, industries, themes, and ideas, and, upon detecting a match, creating a bidirectional link between the newly added research item and the matching entity type. The results of the detected match is then stored in a database. The heuristics comprises any of, or a combination of, the following: heuristics to match the text-based index to a subset of existing research items that have been pre-selected, heuristics to match the text-based index to a company's ticker symbol, (3) heuristics to maintain a problem ticker list that is used to negate matches for tickers in said text-based index that can also represent common abbreviations, (4) heuristics to convert said extracted text-based index to a base or root form, and (5) heuristics to remove short, high frequency, common, and low relevance words from said extracted text-based index;