Search engine and method for retrieving information with queries in natural language

摘要

A search machine finds and ranks documents in a database based on a set of rules that match characteristics of the database with a natural language query. The system includes a lexicon component which may parse the query and the database into words and word stems. Thereafter, the query and documents may be vectorized such that the elements of the vector correspond to a given word stem, and the value of the element in the vector corresponds to the number of occurrences of the word in the document. The vectorized query is then compared and evaluated against each of the vectorized documents of the database to obtain a ranked list of documents from the database. The user may evaluate the documents found and provide information back to the search machine in order to adjust, for example, the ranking produced by the search machine. In this way, the search machine can fine tune its search and ranking technique to meet the user's specific criteria.