Semantically weighted searching in a governed corpus of terms

A system for conducting semantically weighted searches in a corpus of terms, the method comprising:

• a lexical database storing a plurality of terms;
• a concept store storing a hierarchy of concepts associated with terms in the lexical database;
• a term to concept mapping table for storing mappings between the terms in the lexical database and the concepts assigned to the terms;
• a governed corpus store for storing a governed corpus of terms comprising a plurality of corpus expressions, each governed corpus expression comprising a plurality of terms;
• a governed corpus to concept mapping table for storing mappings between the terms of the corpus expressions and a unique concept assigned to each of the terms from the concept store;
• a semantic search engine for receiving a search expression comprising a plurality of terms for performing a search in the governed corpus of terms to find at least one related corpus expression, the semantic search engine comprising:
• a concept mapper operable for syntactically matching every term of the search expression to the terms in the lexical database and assigning one or more concepts from the concept store to the terms of the search expression;
• a calculation module operable for calculating a semantic similarity between each pair of concepts of the search expression and the corpus expressions, the pair of concepts comprising a concept assigned to a term in the search expression and a concept assigned to a correspondingly positioned term in one of the corpus expressions;
• and calculating a total semantic similarity between the search expression and the corpus expressions by combining the semantic similarities of the pairs of concepts of the individual terms based on the order of significance of the terms;
• and
• a relation designator for designating the corpus expression as being related to the search expression when the value of the total semantic similarity is greater than a threshold value.

A machine-accessible medium that comprises instructions which, when executed by a machine, causes the machine to perform operations comprising:

• receiving a search expression having a plurality of terms for performing a search in the governed corpus of terms, wherein the governed corpus of terms comprises a plurality of corpus expressions each comprising a plurality of terms, wherein each term within the governed corpus of terms is associated precisely with a single concept within a lexical database;
• based on a syntactical analysis, assigning at least one concept of the lexical database to each term in the search expression;
• calculating a semantic similarity between pairs of concepts of the search expression and one of the corpus expressions, the pairs of concepts comprising a concept assigned to one of the terms in the search expression and a concept assigned to a correspondingly positioned term in the one of the corpus expressions;
• and
• calculating a total semantic similarity between the search expression and the one of the corpus expressions by aggregating the semantic similarities of the pairs of concepts based on an order of significance of the terms.