Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, operable to perform operations including receiving from a user a search query; and receiving an indication of a user preference to apply transliteration in simplifying the query terms of the search query. Alternatively, the operations include receiving from a user a search query of query terms; applying transliteration in simplifying the query terms; and using the simplified query terms to identify synonyms to use in augmenting the search query. Alternatively, the operations include receiving from a user a search query; identifying the user interface language as a small language or not a small language; simplifying each query term to a simplified form; and if the user interface language is a small language, for each original query term that has a simplified form different from the original term, using the original query term as-is and not providing any synonyms for the query term.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, operable to perform operations including receiving through a user interface with an interface language a search query having query terms; using the interface language to select one or more mappings and using the selected mappings to simplify each query term; and applying each simplified query term to a synonyms map to identify possible synonyms with which to augment the search query. In alternative embodiments, the operations include generating a synonyms map from a corpus of documents; where the synonyms map maps each of multiple keys to one or more corresponding variants, where each variant is associated with one or more of document languages. In alternative embodiments, the operations include generating a synonyms map from documents by applying document language-dependent mappings to words in the documents to generate keys for the map.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, operable to perform operations including receiving from a user through a user interface a search query comprising one or more query terms, the user interface having an interface language, the interface language being a natural language; and determining a query language for the query from the query terms and the interface language, the query language being a natural language.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, operable to perform operations including receiving from a user through a user interface a search query comprising a query term, the search query having attributed to it a query language; deriving a simplified query term from the query term; and identifying one or more potential synonyms for the query term by looking up the simplified query term in a synonyms map, the synonyms map mapping each of a plurality of keys to one or more corresponding variants, each variant being a word associated with one or more document languages, and each variant being associated for each associated language with a variant-language score indicating a relative frequency of the variant among all variants for the associated language for the same key.