Abstract: Aspects of the invention may comprise a method for improving execution speed of a semantic query on a database by executing the semantic query on a subset of relevant documents in the database. The method may provide for improving execution speed without sacrificing accuracy because the subset of documents comprises documents relevant to the semantic query. Aspects of the invention may further provide for identifying key concepts in a semantic query and generating a filter query based on the identified key concepts. The filter query may be used to select the subset of relevant documents. Aspects further provide for generating one or more keyword queries based on a key concept and at least one search operator. The filter query may incorporate at least one keyword query. Aspects of the invention further comprise implementing entity recognition, metadata filtering, and essentialness to improve the selected subset.