1. A computer implemented method for generating refinements within a corpus, the method comprising: receiving a topic from a user in a user interface; generating, dynamically, a plurality of terms associated with the topic, wherein the generating the plurality of terms comprises: communicating a query to a semantic network based on the topic; receiving the plurality of terms from the semantic network in response to the query; evaluating each of the plurality of terms against the corpus, the evaluating comprising determining that an informativeness measure for the term is within acceptable limits; and presenting automatically to the user, before a further interaction by the user with the user interface after receiving the topic, only the plurality of terms that are determined to have the informativeness measure within the acceptable limits, each presented term being a selectable refinement in response to receiving the topic from the user entered in the user interface, the selectable refinement associated with at least one action of a plurality of available associated actions; wherein the presenting automatically to the user, before the further interaction by the user with the user interface after receiving the topic, comprises displaying initial search results from the topic in the user interface, the initial search results comprising links to one or more items of the corpus, and the selectable refinement displays a number of items of the initial search results that correspond to each of the plurality of terms; wherein the generating comprises receiving a plurality of meanings for the topic, and the presenting comprises displaying for each of the meanings a set of one or more of the plurality of terms that relate to the meaning; wherein one of the selectable refinements, when selected by the user and associated with an action comprising a text search, generates additional search results that are a subset of the initial search results and that correspond to the term of the selected refinement.