Patent ID: 6952691

Claim:
A method of creating and searching a database of multi-lingual documents, the method comprising the steps of: using a keyword dictionary to extract keywords; translating the keywords into the languages supported by a bi-directional synonym listing; creating a keyword listing in each supported language; using the keywords in each supported language to create more than one inverted index of the documents including the keywords, one inverted index being in a first language and another inverted index being in a second language; retrieving documents in a search mode comprising the steps of: translating a search term in a query from the first language to the second language using the same bi-directional synonym listing, generating a translated query based on the translated search term, submitting the query and the translated query to first and second different inverted indices, submitting one of the query and the translated query to the other of the first and second inverted indices, receiving first and second results of the search using the first and second inverted indices and selecting one of the first and second results for use.