US Patent 7437349 Adaptive probabilistic query expansion

A method, system and computer program for adaptively processing a query search. An expanding operation is utilized to expand the query into sub-queries, wherein at least one of the sub-queries is expanded probabilistically. A retrieving operation retrieves the results of the sub-queries, and a merging operation is used to merge the sub-query results into a search result. An adapting operation is configured to modify the search such that the relevance of the search result is increased when the search is repeated.