Patent ID: 6480843
Filing Date: 2002-11-12
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A method of querying a database of documents, the database including a preliminary index of the documents, words contained in the documents and associations therebetween, the words in the preliminary index being of an original granularity, the method comprising the steps of:a) replacing the words in the preliminary index with corresponding higher granularity concepts, resulting in a coarser granularity index of reduced index size; b) logically expanding a query applied to the database of documents by replacing only the words of the query, being of the original granularity, meeting a predetermined criterion, which is whether the words can be found in a lexical dictionary with corresponding ones of the higher granularity concepts, b)(i) wherein the higher granularity concepts are higher granularity semantic concepts, b)(ii) further logically expanding the query by adding syntactically related words for each of the corresponding ones of the higher granularity concepts; b)(iii) further logically expanding the query by adding syntactically related words for each of the words in the query failing to meet the predetermined criterion; b)(iv) replacing ones of the syntactically related words meeting the predetermined criterion with associated ones of the higher granularity concepts; and b)(v) removing any redundant ones of the syntactically related words and higher granularity concepts from the expanded query; c) executing the logically expanded query to retrieve ones of the documents associated, through the coarser granularity index, with the corresponding ones of the higher granularity concepts; and d) retrieving ones of the documents in order of relevance until a predetermined number of ones of the documents associated with the corresponding ones of the higher granularity concepts are retrieved, wherein the order of relevance is an exact match, a semantic match, a syntactical match and no match between the words of the query and the words contained in the retrieved ones of the documents.