[Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching

[david_fiorito at vanguard.com]

The company pitching natural language search to us talks a lot about the 
ability to return an answer to a question rather than a set of links to 
pages like a classic keyword search.  I for one am very skeptical of this 
kind of claim.  I am especially skeptical since they are trying to sell us 
on the idea that we will never need metadata again since their software 
can somehow "understand" the content of a page.  The whole thing smells a 
little fishy to me - thus the reason for my original post.

Cheers,

Dave






"Ken Bryson" <kbryson at alias.com>
Sent by: sigia-l-admin at asis.org
02/20/2004 12:39 PM

 
        To:     <sigia-l at asis.org>
        cc:     (bcc: David Fiorito/IT/VGI)
        Subject:        RE: [Sigia-l] Natural Language Searching vs Keyword Searching







>> Does anyone have any thoughts on the relative merits of these two types
of search?  In >>what context is one more effective that the other?
Pros/Cons of each?  Thoughts?
>>Opinions?

> But if a natural language search returns several hundred or several
thousands of
> documents, then the search is pretty useless. That's when keyword 
tagging
becomes
> important.


I don't think it's just a matter of natural language sucks in all 
instances
over 10 documents. There's no reason you can't make good use of metadata 
and
thesauri AND put a natural language front end search on it.  When you do
that, the differences between natural language and keyword boolean 
searching
becomes clear, at least from my own research.

Boolean searches are better for known item searches, and natural language
searches are *sometimes* better for subject searches.  It all really 
depends
on the skill, or lack thereof, of the searcher.


-kb

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