Abstract: Techniques for generating sophisticated representations of the contents of both queries and documents in a retrieval system by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to represent, index, and retrieve texts at the multiple levels (e.g., the morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic levels) at which humans construe meaning in writing. The user enters a query and the system processes the query to generate an alternative representation, which includes conceptual-level abstraction and representations based on complex nominals (CNs), proper nouns (PNs), single terms, text structure, and logical make-up of the query, including mandatory terms. After processing the query, the system displays query information to the user, indicating the system's interpretation and representation of the content of the query. The user is then given an opportunity to provide input, in response to which the system modifies the alternative representation of the query.

Abstract: A document retrieval system where a user can enter a query, including a natural language query, in a desired one of a plurality of supported languages, and retrieve documents from a database that includes documents in at least one other language of the plurality of supported languages. The user need not have any knowledge of the other languages. Each document in the database is subjected to a set of processing steps to generate a language-independent conceptual representation of the subject content of the document. This is normally done before the query is entered. The query is also subjected to a (possibly different) set of processing steps to generate a language-independent conceptual representation of the subject content of the query. The documents and queries can also be subjected to additional analysis to provide additional term-based representations, such as the extraction of information-rich terms and phrases (such as proper nouns).