1. Apparatus for information processing, comprising: a processor; and computer memory storing computer program instructions that when executed by the processor perform a method comprising: normalizing, using a natural language processing (NLP) mapping, text contents of a set of documents onto a structured ontology, the text contents in the set of documents representing at least one concept in the structured ontology having a set of subordinate concepts that are described by synonymous, but textually disparate phrases; modeling the structured ontology as a hierarchical data structure; normalizing a search query using the NLP mapping used to normalize the text contents of the set of documents; and processing the normalized search query against the hierarchical data structure in lieu of the search query to identify documents associated with the at least one concept, the processing of the normalized search query associated with the concept also returning results associated with the subordinate concepts.
1. Apparatus for information processing, comprising: a processor; and computer memory storing computer program instructions that when executed by the processor perform a method comprising: normalizing, using a natural language processing (NLP) mapping, text contents of a set of documents onto a structured ontology, the text contents in the set of documents representing at least one concept in the structured ontology having a set of subordinate concepts that are described by synonymous, but textually disparate phrases; modeling the structured ontology as a hierarchical data structure; normalizing a search query using the NLP mapping used to normalize the text contents of the set of documents; and processing the normalized search query against the hierarchical data structure in lieu of the search query to identify documents associated with the at least one concept, the processing of the normalized search query associated with the concept also returning results associated with the subordinate concepts. 5. The apparatus as described in claim 1 wherein the normalizing step maps text contents of the set of documents to a controlled vocabulary.