Techniques described herein assist users in satisfying complex information needs represented as long, detailed questions. A generalized search assistance framework for complex information needs is disclosed. Given a detailed question, the techniques enrich the original question with a set of related concepts. The types of questions handled are detailed, complex questions similar to the ones posted in Q&A portals. A generalized search assistance framework enriches complex detailed questions with topically related concepts. A basic pipeline represents an instantiation of such the search assistance framework. Given a detailed question, the pipeline relies on semantic and syntactic relationships in the detailed question in order to construct a set of related queries. The queries are issued to a commercial search engine and the retrieved results are processed by state-of-the-art document understanding techniques in order to retrieve important concepts. A final concept set for enriching the original question is then assembled.