QUESTION CONVERSION FOR INFORMATION SEARCHING

摘要

A question conversion engine converts terms and phrases used in a user's question into terms and phrases that are more likely to produce information containing the search terms. The question conversion engine parses a user's question to associate each term in the user's question with a part of speech and to eliminate extraneous terms in the user's question. A term/phrase replacement map is used to replace terms and/or phrases in the user's question with replaced terms and phrases that are more likely to produce relevant information. The question conversion engine matches the user's question to a declarative expression thereby altering the semantics of the question into an expression that is more likely to produce optimum search results.