METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FROM A DOMAIN BY SUB- STITUTING DOMAIN SPECIFIC STEMMED PHRASES INTO NATURAL LANGUAGE TO CREATE A SEARCH QUERY

A computer implemented process for creating a search query for an information retrieval system in which a database is provided containing a plurality of stopwords and phrases. A natural language input query defines the composition of the test of documents to be identified. Each word of the natural language input query is compared to the database in order to remove stopwords from the query. The remaining words of the input query are stemmed to their basic roots, and the sequence of stemmed words in the list is compared to phrases in the database to identify phrases in the search query. The phrases are substituted for the sequence of stemmed words from the list so that the remaining elements, namely the substituted phrases and unsubstituted stemmed words, form the search query. The completed search query elements are query nodes of a query network used to match representation nodes of a document network of an inference network. The database includes as options a topic and key database for finding numerical keys, and a synonym database for finding synonyms, both of which are employed in the query as query nodes.