Patent ID: 8560532

Claim:
A system for determining one or more concepts associated with a query, comprising: a processor configured to: receive a query; receive a list of result documents ordered by relevance to the query; receive a list of candidate concepts, the concepts being tags associated with the result documents, the concepts fitting within a concept hierarchy; determine concept voting scores, each concept voting score indicating the prevalence of a concept being tagged to individual documents of the list of result documents; use a density function to evaluate the received concepts; and associate one or more concepts with the query based at least in part on the results of the density function; and a memory coupled to the processor and configured to provide the processor with instructions wherein each individual document of the list of resultant documents comprises a text match score, the text match score for each individual document being determined from the document's relevance to the query, and wherein the concept voting scores more specifically comprise a sum of text match scores for result documents with which the associated concept is tagged; and wherein the processor is further configured to determine cooccurrence scores, each cooccurrence score comprising a voting score compared with an expected cooccurrence score for the associated concept, the expected cooccurrence score comprising the multiplication product of: a number of result documents divided by a number of documents in a searched index and a number of documents in the searched index having the associated concept tagged thereto divided by the number of documents in the searched index.