US Patent 8027973 Searching questions based on topic and focus

A method and system for determining the relevance of questions to a queried question based on topics and focuses of the questions is provided. A question search system provides a collection of questions with topics and focuses. Upon receiving a queried question, the question search system identifies a queried topic and queried focus of the queried question. The question search system generates a score indicating the relevance of a question of the collection to the queried question based on a language model of the topic of the question and a language model of the focus of the question.