Google Inc.

Abhijit A Mahabal

Kenji Inoue

John J Lee

John R Provine

Zachary A Garrett

Takahiro Nakajima

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for associating each of a plurality of different terms to documents that contain the term to create first associations; associating each of the associated documents to one or more queries to create second associations, wherein search results for each of the queries include a reference to the associated document; determining a particular query and a particular term are associated with a same document based on the first and second associations; in response to the determination, creating a mapping between the particular query and the particular term when both are associated with the same document; and selecting a respective answer from a plurality of mapped terms for each the mapped queries, wherein the respective answer is selected based on a count the respective answer occurs in documents contained in search results for the mapped queries.

Reverse question answering

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for identifying a particular query term of an original search query, identifying a candidate synonym for the particular query term in context with an other non-adjacent query term of the original search query that is not adjacent to the particular query term in the original search query, accessing stored data that specifies, for a pair of terms that includes the particular query term and the candidate synonym of the particular query term, a respective confidence value for the other non-adjacent query term, determining that, in the stored data, the confidence value for the other non-adjacent query term satisfies a threshold, and determining to revise the original search query to include the candidate synonym of the particular query term, based on determining that the confidence value the other non-adjacent query term satisfies the threshold.

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Jersey City, NJ, United States of America

Abhijit A Mahabal