QUERY EXPANSION USING A GRAPH OF QUESTION AND ANSWER VOCABULARY

A method and/or system for query expansion may include: providing a set of training data in a given domain in the form of training question texts and training answer texts, identifying disjoint answer words in the training answer text that do not occur in the associated training question text, generating a graph of question word nodes and answer word nodes generated from the set of training data for the given domain in the form of the training question texts and the training answer texts, wherein edges are provided between a disjoint pair of a question word node for a question word in a training question and an answer word node for a disjoint answer word in an associated training answer, and applying spreading activation through the graph to result in a top n most highly activated nodes that are used as candidate words for expansion of a user query input.