Patent ID: 7428529

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for related term suggestion, the method comprising: mining search results via a multi-sense query, wherein the multi-sense query comprises: determining terms/phrases semantically related to submitted terms/phrases, wherein semantic relationships are discovered by mining a context of the terms/phrases to determine meaning; configuring a threshold frequency of occurrence (FOO) value; assigning historical queries to high FOO or low FOO based on the configured threshold value; generating term vectors from the search results associated with a set of high FOO historical queries previously submitted to a search engine; and generating term clusters as a function of calculated similarity of term vectors, wherein calculated similarity, sim(q j , q k ), is determined as follows: sim ⁡ ( q j , q k ) = ∑ i = 1 d ⁢ ⁢ w ij · w ik ; wherein d represents vector dimension, q represents a query, k is a dimension index, and wherein weight w for the i th vector's j th term is calculated as follows: w ij =TF ij ×log( N/DF j ); and wherein TF ij represents term frequency, N is a total number of query terms, and DF j is a number of extracted feature records that contain the i th vector's j th term; responsive to receiving a term/phrase from an entity, evaluating the term/phrase via the multi-sense query in view of terms/phrases in the term clusters to identify one or more related term suggestions, wherein the identifying is based on a combination of FOO and a confidence value; and returning at least one suggested term list ordered by the combination of FOO and confidence value, wherein multiple suggested term lists are generated when the term/phrase matches terms in more than one term cluster.