4. The method of claim 1 , wherein each child context in the context hierarchy includes all of the context terms of a parent context of the child context as well as an additional context term that does not occur in the parent context of the child context.
1. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving a query having an original term; determining one or more substitution contexts for the original term, wherein a substitution context includes one or more conditions for substituting an original term with a substitute term, wherein the one or more conditions specify one or more context terms from the query and an indication of a position in the query of the original term relative to the one or more context terms; generating a context hierarchy including the one or more substitution contexts for the original term, wherein any conditions of a parent context in the context hierarchy also apply to each of one or more child contexts of a parent context, and wherein each child context in the context hierarchy includes all of the context terms of a parent context of the child context as well as an additional context term that does not occur in the parent context of the child context; determining a respective score for each substitution context of the one or more substitution contexts including comparing the substitution context to its parent substitution context to compute a measure of how much an additional term of the substitution context adds meaning to the original term when choosing substitute terms for the original term; classifying each of the substitution contexts into a first category or a second category based on a respective score of each substitution context; associating the original term with one or more substitution contexts in the first category; and providing only substitution contexts in the first category to a substitute term generation process that generates substitute terms for the original term in the query.