Patent ID: 7962479

Claim:
A method for generating one or more related queries with respect to a given query, the method comprising: receiving a query comprising one or more terms; generating a corpus of candidate reformulations based on the received query; identifying one or more queries or terms from the corpus of candidate reformulations related to the received query; generating with a processor one or more related queries on the basis of the identified one or more queries or terms from the corpus of candidate reformulations and segmenting the received query into one or more segments; calculating a relevance factor by assigning a likelihood ratio score to each of the one or more related queries, the likelihood ratio indicating a degree of relatedness of the one or more related queries to the query, the likelihood ratio calculated by comparing a plurality of pair independence functions to each other, the pair independence functions being a function of a number of occurrences of the one or more related queries in the corpus of candidate reformulations; and comparing the relevance factor for each of the one or more related queries to a threshold and selecting therefrom at least one related query that exceeds the threshold.