Patent ID: 8156142
Filing Date: 2012-04-10
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A computer implemented method for conducting semantically weighted searches in a governed corpus of terms, the method comprising: receiving a search expression having a plurality of terms for performing a search in the governed corpus of terms, wherein the governed corpus of terms comprises a plurality of corpus expressions each comprising a plurality of terms, wherein each term within the governed corpus of terms is associated precisely with a single concept within a lexical database; based on a syntactical analysis, assigning, by a processor of the computer, at least one concept of the lexical database to each term in the search expression; assigning, by the processor of the computer, a weight to each term of the one of the corpus expressions such that a most significant term of the corpus expression is assigned the highest weight and the least significant term is assigned the lowest weight; based on the assigned weight, calculating, by the processor of the computer, a semantic similarity between pairs of concepts of the search expression and one of the corpus expressions, the pairs of concepts comprising a concept assigned to one of the terms in the search expression and a concept assigned to a correspondingly positioned term in the one of the corpus expressions, wherein calculating the semantic similarity between pairs of concepts of the search expression and the one of the corpus expressions comprises: calculating, by the processor of the computer, a total semantic similarity between the search expression and the one of the corpus expressions by aggregating the semantic similarities of the pairs of concepts based on an order of significance of the terms.