One of the most important components of Pre-2010 Google's search system was its synonym discovery mechanism. Simply put, queries would be "expanded" with synonyms. Google automatically generated synonym choices that took into account the context of surrounding words, with the understanding that synonyms are highly context dependent. Steven Baker, John Lamping, and a couple of others were key engineers of the system.
Does anyone with a NLP background care to take some guesses on how the synonym extraction methodology worked? My only piece of information is that it likely used the query log itself to do so.
Does anyone with a NLP background care to take some guesses on how the synonym extraction methodology worked? My only piece of information is that it likely used the query log itself to do so.