While preparing a presentation about metadata, I stumbled upon the following patent:
[Automatic extraction of metadata using a neural network](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6044375A).

I have no experience with patents, but the strategies for metadata creation presented in the patent seem very generic to me - not only because the imagery kind of says: "We put text into a NN and it gives us the data" (see the cover of the document) - but also because the interesting parts of the pseudo code are very abstract (see part 15 of the document).

How specific do these kinds of patents need/tend to be?
How similar must my approach be so that it counts as "the same invention"?