[Sigia-l] search results and thesauri

[Avi Rappoport]

These are great discussions -- if anyone has good (or bad) examples 
of implementations, please post.  I love to use real examples when 
I'm giving talks and writing articles.

I think best practices require a number of different approaches, all 
depending on how much vocabulary control and keyword metatagging 
you're doing.

I do not recommend whisking someone to the theoretical applicable 
page without going through search results first.  It breaks the 
expectation and may be wrong.  For example, I'm analyzing a search 
spellchecker (paper to come soon) and someone misspelled "New England 
Journal of Medicine".  The site actually has a record for that, but 
because they misspelled it, the automatic system took them directly 
to the listings for -- Great Britain (because of "England").  Whoops.

My main rule is to explain any automatic conversions (and wish people 
would do that for stemming).  For true synonyms (doctor => 
physician), I think it's legit to just issue the search for the 
preferred term, put a note on the results page, and consider 
highlighting hits in a different form for the original vs. preferred 
term.  In this example, you could do italic for :doctor" and bold for 
"physician".

It does get trickier when you're talking about less solid agreement. 
On a health site, it turned out that they used "Primary Care 
Provider" or "PCP".  PCP is a more inclusive term, because it covers 
Nurse Practitioners and such, but it's not what people really expect 
when they type in a very general term like "doctor".  So I would 
recommend that the site actually provide an informative response to 
general questions about doctors, rather than just using a synonym 
system in this case.

The only search engine I know that allows search admin control over 
whether synonyms are automatically searched or whether they are 
presented as an option is Inktomi Search Software: the synonym file 
has flags for behavior.

Looking forward to learning more,

Avi


At 12:03 PM -0700 5/22/02, Chris Farnum wrote:
(snip)
>So here's a related question... does your search
>engine handle both synonyms AND preferred terms.
>Often 3rd party solutions don't include both and you
>are forced to decide how far to stretch the simple
>equivalence (synonym ring) feature they've given you.
>Your answer will depend partly on your content, partly
>on your indexing guidelines, and partly on how you've
>designed your CV.  For example, if you've got a
>collection of carefully edited and authored content in
>which term usage is very consistent you might need to
>concentrate on the alternate terms that point to your
>preferred terms (so users are less likely to get null
>results).  On the other hand if you have a more
>diverse set of content and users that are concerned
>with high recall, you will likely spend more effort on
>synonyms.  These issues may also impact how you answer
>the highlighting question.
>
>Regards,
>Chris

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