METHOD, SYSTEM AND SOFTWARE FOR SEARCHING, IDENTIFYING, RETRIEVING AND PRESENTING ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS

摘要

The present invention provides a method and system for identifying, retrieving and presenting electronic documents responsive to user queries. The three distinct inventive concepts are relevancy ranking of responsive documents based on component query technique; cross-lingual searching; and search expansion using analytics of initial results to derive and generate a modified query. Each of these inventions enhances document search and retrieval systems and the three solutions may be used separately or in any combination. The three inventions apply in layers above an underlying search system, controlling the submission of requests to the underlying system in support of received search requests, typically originating with an end user. Invention (III) provides a semantic-expansion capability specifically utilizing the availability of language independent fields in the data being searched with natural language query terms. This invention is enhanced by incorporating the preceding two inventions.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method of improving performance of a computer to provide expanded semantic searching of results in a computer-implemented search of a corpus of documents, the method comprising:
a. operating at the search-controller level to mediate between a request function and an underlying generic text-search system and electronically receiving a query containing a set of search terms from the request function; b. by a processor, determining a topic based on the set of search terms and identifying documents related to the topic irrespective of whether the identified documents contain any of the set of search terms, the step of identifying documents comprising: c. performing a narrow search-term expansion by determining alternative terms to be combined with the submitted set of search terms to create a narrowly expanded search term set for use by the search engine, narrow search-term expansion adapted to result in an initial broadening of the sampling-search step (d); d. performing a sampling-search using the narrowly expanded search term set determined in step (c); and e. retrieving data from a set of sample fields as a sample set of the identified complete set of responsive documents, the set of sample fields being preselected to be language independent but strongly topic correlated.