A method, computer readable medium and system are provided which retrieve hint sentences from a sentence database in response to a query. An input component receives the query having terms. A search engine expands the query by including synonyms of the terms to obtain expanded terms. The search engine then combines the expanded terms to form dependency triples from the expanded terms. From the formed dependency triples, dependency triples which are not found in a dependency triples database are discarded to obtain remaining dependency triples from the expanded terms. The search engine then searches the sentence database using the remaining dependency triples as search parameters.