摘要 |
One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that automatically identifies compounds, such as bigrams or n-grams. During operation, the system obtains selections of search results which were selected by one or more users, wherein the search results were previously generated by a search engine in response to queries containing search terms. Next, the system forms a set of candidate compounds from the queries, wherein each candidate compound comprises n consecutive terms from a query. Then, for each candidate compound in the set, the system analyzes the selections of search results to calculate a likelihood that the candidate compound is a compound. |