Patent ID: 8346795

Claim:
A method for refining a user's query for entity-based searching comprising: providing an entity index generated from a corpus of documents, the entity index comprising a set of entity structures, each entity structure comprising a plurality of terms, each of the terms of an entity structure being a feature of a same entity; receiving an input user's query; retrieving, from the entity index, entity structures which match the user's query, each of the retrieved entity structures comprising at least one term which matches at least a part of the user's query; identifying clusters of the retrieved entity structures which have at least one of their terms in common; generating a cluster hierarchy from the identified clusters in which nodes of the hierarchy are defined by at least one the terms of the retrieved entity structures and in which a parent node includes fewer terms of an entity structure than each child node of the parent node and wherein there are sibling nodes which are the child nodes of the parent node; and presenting at least a portion of the cluster hierarchy to the user as a refinement tree for facilitating refinement of the user's query through user selection of a node of the refinement tree which, when formulated as a search, retrieves one or more responsive documents from the corpus of documents.