An example embodiment may involve a software application executable on a computing device of a computational instance of a remote network management platform associated with a managed network. The software application may receive, from a client device of the managed network, a natural language query, determine that a first term of the query does not match any term in a list of predetermined terms, and revise the query by (i) applying a set of linguistic rules that modify the first term to generate a replacement term, (ii) determining whether the replacement term matches at least one term in the list, and (iii) after determining that the replacement term matches at least one term in the list, replacing the first term in the query with the replacement term. The software application may then parse the revised query, search the database, and transmit a result to the client device.