ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,596,681, issued on April 7, was assigned to AARETE (Chicago).

"Systems and methods for improved file processing" was invented by Priya Iragavarapu (Naperville, Ill.), Darren Ghanayem (St. Petersburg, Fla.), Erica Nelson (Mill Valley, Calif.) and Maria Lynn Turner (Palatine, Ill.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods for improved file processing are provided herein. An example system includes instructions stored on one or more memories that may cause the system to extract textual data and metadata from a file, and the metadata may have a hierarchical format to preserve hierarchical data structures of the file. The instruction...