US Patent 7617196 Context-sensitive term expansion with multiple levels of expansion

Methods, articles of manufacture, and systems for searching collections of data using context sensitive expanded term searching are provided. The collection of data may be a relational database, text document, or any other type of searchable collection of data. In either case, a query including a search condition based on a specified search term may be modified to include additional conditions based on a set of expanded (e.g., conceptually-related) search terms. For some embodiments, a user may be given the ability to control the level of expansion and the context in which the terms may be expanded.