METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTERPRETING MULTIPLE-TERM QUERIES

A query interpretation method and system uses a combination of context- independent and contextual evaluation to compute interpretations for multipl e- term queries. The present invention can be used to search a collection of items, each of which is associated with one or more terms. In certain embodiments, query interpretation involves generating several candidate multiple-term interpretations and scoring them to select one or more interpretations. In certain embodiments, query interpretation involves identifying single-term interpretations for the terms in the query, determining context-independent scores for those single-term interpretations , pruning candidate single-term interpretations, identifying a plurality of candidate multiple-term interpretations, determining a contextual score for each candidate multiple-term interpretation, which may involve using differe nt semantic approaches, and generating one or more multiple-term interpretation s that are optimal with respect to a combination of the context-independent an d contextual scoring functions.